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Hazzard posted:What happened? My school ignored their existence when doing both World Wars beyond. "Austria invades Serbia" and then as far as we were concerned, Germany fought WW1 by itself. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, being an Empire (and also a Kingdom!) would have been considered pre-war to be one of the 'major monarchies'. It had a pretty bad war, mostly being propped up by the Germans, and kind of fell apart in the immediate post-war period in much the same way as Germany and Russia did. Being a somewhat unhappy conglomeration of different peoples it was already an anomaly by 19th century nationalist standards (and this is one of the reasons it was the Austro-Hungarian empire not just Austrian by this point - tough luck to Czechs, Slavs etc though) so it basically separated into its constituent parts postwar.
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Apr 20, 2016 17:59
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Helicon One posted:The Western Allied forces did [THING]. The Western Allies were on the winning side. Ergo, doing [THING] was the right choice. finally a clear refutation of vegetarianism and bans on animal testing
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Apr 20, 2016 18:13
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Polyakov posted:
There's definitely a break in strategic bombing effectiveness between 39-42 and 42-45, in effect because British bomber doctrine before the introduction of massed four-engine raids was utterly utterly lovely. No bomber stream, so everyone navigates to the target alone. Navigators given gently caress-all training, because everyone apart from the pilot is technically ground crew doing an extra job to fill seats, and the navigator is a pilot who might have had more than a week's training, but probably only got that in daylight. Bomb loads are comparatively small, and their aiming point was the bomb load dropped by the previous plane that somehow managed to get somewhere nearby - so if your first bomber misses, the rest of them will as well. The 1941 Butt Report (transcript)basically laid out that the RAFs strategic bombing was achieving precisely sod-all except for terrorising small villages (bombed because they looked like large cities) and laying waste to the German countryside, with 9% of bombers reaching their targets for the Ruhr valley. It notes that navigation by anything other than visual means is a massive failure, so bombing on overcast nights or nights with no moon was almost completely pointless. Edit: May as well copy in the conclusions: The Butt Report posted:An examination of night photographs taken during So, we put up 100 bombers to hit a target on the Ruhr, and 10 get to within five miles, but if it's hazy thats probably going down to one. And thats assuming that all 100 actually report getting to the target at all - combine it with mechanical failure and just not thinking you're over the target at all, and you're probably losing more bombers per sortie than are actually getting anywhere near the target! Of course the response to this was that Bomber Command issued their own report claiming that this was total bollocks and actually Bomber Command could win the war on it's own, based on the scientific principle of "we'll kill all the Germans, of course!", the meat of their argument being that if they bombed large cities they couldn't possibly miss - ignoring the Butt report's conclusion that RAF bombers were also missing large cities equally well. RAF bombers with puny navigation equipment continued to be sent out over Germany in order to kill the occasional civilian, mostly miss military targets and decimate the Ruhr's supply of unbombed fields. Of course, the one place Britain could bomb accurately was the French ports, so Le Harve and Brest received relatively accurate raids that managed to kill about 8,000 French civilians and slightly damage the Scharnhorst. It was only in 1942 that the "dehousing" issue became the policy, essentially for want of anything else to do and in case Bomber Command's resources and money were stripped to supply more directly effective parts of the war effort. It had become clear that RAF tactics were extremely lovely at knocking out German industrial capacity, and so they turned to indiscriminate bombing as an indirect means of destroying capacity. In the course of developing better ways of There's an excellent book by Derek Robinson called "Damned Good Show" about the RAF's early attempts at a bombing campaign, that is based around the concept that they were strategically useless but politically useful. Some great quotes from the notes at the end: "Let me quote an experienced RAF Night Fighter Pilot, Air Commodore Roderick Chisolm... "Here, so I thought as we circled high above, was a whole town on fire. The extent of the fires was barely credible... I was to discover some months later.. that the city had hardly been hit on this raid, and most of the bombs had fallen in the woods outside" - from a raid on Hanover in 1943, 16 bombers lost, followed by another a week later - same result - 678 bombers sent out, 38 lost. A week later was the "big" Hanover raid, the one that destroyed most of the city - and the one that suggests that bombing was largely effective. It was, of course, in the end. "Morale is a weapon of war. And the hard fact was that, for all it's failings, Bomber command was taking the war to the enemy homeland... In 1941 there was [no alternative]. The bombing campaign sent a message to the British people - keep it up, Germany is suffering. It sent a signal to America - Britain is still fighting. It sent a message to Russia: Britain is fighting too. So bomber command had to carry on their nightly battle. It was not so much a battle to help win the war - that came later - as a much grimmer battle to avoid losing it" *Aren't military euphemisms such a ridiculous smokescreen for anything that might suggest that the Armed Forces have one job: killing people? lenoon fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Apr 20, 2016 |
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Apr 20, 2016 18:53
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lenoon posted:*Aren't military euphemisms such a ridiculous smokescreen for anything that might suggest that the Armed Forces have one job: killing people? I think there's a bit more nuance to that, otherwise OIF could be considered a smashing success.
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Apr 20, 2016 19:21
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JcDent posted:I think there's a bit more nuance to that, otherwise OIF could be considered a smashing success. Meh, whatever the aim, that's the job really isn't it. "Dehousing" was, is and will no doubt be again a convenient way of saying "kill civilians". Its pretty hilarious really - we were manifestly the good guys in the second world war, literally fighting against an evil empire. There's no need to sugar coat that we did some pretty morally grey poo poo, it's not like we're looking for moral equivalence here. But say "killing and terrorising civilians was a deliberate aim" and suddenly you're crossing a line, even though "dehousing" means exactly that. I always find military euphemisms sadly hilarious. edit: Were pre-20th century militaries fond of their euphemisms? lenoon fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Apr 20, 2016 |
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Apr 20, 2016 19:32
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Fangz posted:The US dropped twice as many bombs during the Vietnam War as was dropped in WWII. This was helped by the advances in aircraft design and technology since WWII. An F-4 Phantom could carry almost as many bombs as a B-29 and probably drop them more accurately.
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Apr 20, 2016 19:42
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lenoon posted:edit: Were pre-20th century militaries fond of their euphemisms? edit: "entleiben" or "umbringen" for kill to say that one of your soldiers has died, you can say "gestorben" (died), but a lot of times they say "he remains in [whatever location you just left]." I think these guys were so mobile that eventually saying someone has stopped moving means that something is wrong. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Apr 20, 2016 |
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Apr 20, 2016 19:43
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HEY GAL posted:It's not just the state or symbols of the state, they're apparently really touchy about insults in general and willing to go to court over the least little things. And have been ever since Hieronymus Sebastian Schutze and friends or probably even earlier. I just didn't know that the Chancellor was also allowed to bring suit on a foreign head of state's behalf (they have to file for permission first). There's one article that concerns heads of state, Article 103 of the criminal code, which bans "the insulting of foreign heads of institutions of state." And then there's Article 185, which bans insults against persons. Violating Article 185 can lead to a one year prison sentence, violating Article 103 can lead to a 5 year one, because kings are more important than peasants. Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi and all that. But there's also Article 189 which bans "disparagement of the memory of the dead"; you can actually libel a corpse in 2016 Germany. Article 188 has stronger penalties for "smearing and defaming" a "person involved in political life" if the speech is related to that person's political activities and "makes their public work significantly harder." Article 192 says that even if a statement is 100% true and factual it can still constitute libel. This article has some typos but is a reasonably deep delve into German libel laws. https://popehat.com/2016/04/20/germanys-libel-laws-a-threat-to-democracy-guest-post-by-colin-cortbus%5C quote:The attack on Boehmerman’s speech rights is not the first time Article 103 has been used to suppress democratic speech at the behest of the powerful. In Original has supporting links and many examples of cases where these laws have been used to censor and suppress free speech and put people in prison for things as trivial as insulting bureaucrats. Worth a read.
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Apr 20, 2016 19:49
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OK, so I got into an argument with a racist last year, and I wish I had told him to suck my cock you fat bald cuck on his way out, but I didn't. If I had, could he have sued me even though he was English and I am American? also all of this beats duelling, which would have happened in 1916 germany. In addition to the lawsuits: http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Imperial-Germany-1871-1914-European/dp/0521198321 HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Apr 20, 2016 |
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Apr 20, 2016 19:54
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Look, there's an easy solution to all of this: Have that comedian and Erdogan pick seconds, meet up in an ally outside a bar, and stab the poo poo out of each other with rapiers. Honor is satisfied and if we have any luck at all Turkey holds an election the next weekend. edit: goddamnit Heygal, I was writing that before you edited. 
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Apr 20, 2016 19:56
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HEY GAL posted:OK, so I got into an argument with a racist last year, and I wish I had told him to suck my cock you fat bald cuck on his way out, but I didn't. If I had, could he have sued me even though he was English and I am American? England also has some pretty toxic libel laws so I'm just gonna go ahead and guess "yes."
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Apr 20, 2016 19:57
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The best part of being an American: I can write "hey Erdogan, your mother works weekends in a Kurdish brothel alongside Queen Elizabeth" and no one can do gently caress all about it.
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Apr 20, 2016 19:59
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Cyrano4747 posted:Look, there's an easy solution to all of this: Have that comedian and Erdogan pick seconds, meet up in an ally outside a bar, and stab the poo poo out of each other with rapiers. Honor is satisfied and if we have any luck at all Turkey holds an election the next weekend.
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Apr 20, 2016 19:59
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Phanatic posted:toxic
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Apr 20, 2016 20:02
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lenoon posted:Meh, whatever the aim, that's the job really isn't it. No, not really. The aim/job/whatever of a military is to enforce the policies and strategies of their respective government/leader/warlord/pope/whatever. Physical violence is only one part of that, and it really isn't a particularly big part all things considered.
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Apr 20, 2016 20:03
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bewbies posted:No, not really. The aim/job/whatever of a military is to enforce the policies and strategies of their respective government/leader/warlord/pope/whatever. Physical violence is only one part of that, and it really isn't a particularly big part all things considered. At times it seems the core job is keeping things painted!
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Apr 20, 2016 20:07
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razak posted:At times it seems the core job is keeping things painted! Watertight integrity or gleaming metalwork is a hard choice.
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Apr 20, 2016 20:14
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bewbies posted:No, not really. The aim/job/whatever of a military is to enforce the policies and strategies of their respective government/leader/warlord/pope/whatever. Physical violence is only one part of that, and it really isn't a particularly big part all things considered. True, but physical violence is the means used to achieve that end unless you are extending "military" out to encompass all of a nation's foreign policy. Whatever your specific aims might be you are going to kill a bunch of people doing it.* "Dehousing" German industrial workers is a perfect example of this. Blowing up the house might be the stated goal, and we can even suspend our cynicism for a bit and say that it is the only goal, but in the real world ca. 1944 you aren't going to do it without killing a fuckload of people. That's also ignoring the fact that when we talk about strategic bombing in WW2 in particular there are a lot of people talking very plainly about killing civilians to terrorize the population into pressing the government for peace. This is important because these all feed directly into the strategic air doctrine that you see in the Cold War, especially regarding nukes. There are a million reasons to drop a nuke on Moscow in WW3. Industry, it was a major communications hub, it was the administrative and military center of the USSR, etc. Be that as it may, you can't separate blowing that poo poo up from the fact that a poo poo load of Muscovites are also going to be evaporated. The existential threat to population centers posed by those weapons, even if only as a by-product of hitting other targets, is a huge part of the political calculus that produces MAD. Civilian population centers have been considered legitimate targets for a loving long time at this point. Everyone wrings their hands over drones dropping high explosives on the wrong house or a wedding party (and well they should, that's awful), but the reality is that there are still people in the military thinking about how to inflict maximum pain on major cities in a nuclear exchange. You really can't stuff the total war genie back in the bottle. *note that I"m talking about warfare as it has existed historically. We can talk theoretically about how these ends could be achieved without physical violence and the military would still be successful. We're just starting to see that with some cyberwar stuff, but we have yet to invent a way to magically evaporate factories and power plants without killing people. PGMs etc have gone a long way in the past 60 years toward minimizing the loss of life, but it's still a fundamentally violent business.
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Apr 20, 2016 20:16
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Cyrano4747 posted:It also has a lot to do with civilian population centers becoming legitimate military targets. There were tons of theories about this, ranging from ideas about impacting industry through "de-housing" (i.e. killing in their beds) industrial workers through the pretty honest assessment of bombing as a terror weapon to make it so unpleasant for civilians that the government was forced to sue for peace. The second part in particular was heavily influenced by French and British fears during WW1 that they were a bad campaign away from popular unrest in 1917, the collapse of Russia at the same time due to a revolution, and the way that Berlin in particular turned against the Imperial German state at the end. Remember: the last war is one that saw two of the three major monarchies - and the only two where the monarch was still the undisputed head of state - collapse due to civil unrest brought on by the war being absolute poo poo. Of course there were specific tensions in those systems that they fractured along, but from the outside observer it looked like poo poo just got so bad for the home front that they kicked the fuckers out of power. From that standpoint bombing population centers isn't really that far a jump from blockading the enemy to force food and materiel shortages. It's basically the next step in a modern understanding of total warfare that strikes directly at the enemy's economic productivity, and by extension at its population. One thing I was actually wondering here: the whole "make war so nightmarish they sue for peace [and thus in the long run it's merciful compared to letting the war drag out]" seems to be a common rationale in aerial bombing campaigns; even when the Germans in World War 1 started Zeppelin-bombing, this rationale crops up. I was kinda surprised when watching "the civil war" that the idea is actually referenced by Sherman, too, during his march to the sea. Is this just a modern idea about warfare in general? And if it is a modern idea, how does that square with "night area bombing" being a waste of time? (I can guess at least part of the answer, which is when you apply a cost benefit analysis you see that high explosives are just not damaging enough compared to, say, lighting the whole city on fire.) PS I think I agree with you that "the bomber always gets through" and whatnot is a runup to nuclear weapons and MAD and the like.
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Apr 20, 2016 20:24
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Nebakenezzer posted:One thing I was actually wondering here: the whole "make war so nightmarish they sue for peace [and thus in the long run it's merciful compared to letting the war drag out]" seems to be a common rationale in aerial bombing campaigns; even when the Germans in World War 1 started Zeppelin-bombing, this rationale crops up. I was kinda surprised when watching "the civil war" that the idea is actually referenced by Sherman, too, during his march to the sea. Is this just a modern idea about warfare in general? And if it is a modern idea, how does that square with "night area bombing" being a waste of time? (I can guess at least part of the answer, which is when you apply a cost benefit analysis you see that high explosives are just not damaging enough compared to, say, lighting the whole city on fire.) What you have to realize is that there isn't really a single argument or even set of arguments made about this stuff. The people who argue that strategic bombing was a waste of time in WW2 are generally either A) looking at a narrow economic analysis that seems to indicate German industry wasn't disrupted enough to justify the expenditure or B) argue that since the home fronts never collapsed it was a wasted endeavor. We've already seen up-thread people pointing out arguments about how it was as much a political move to shore up domestic support (i.e. pure vengeance for damage done to their cities) or a show to allies in other theaters that they were still in the fight. If you look at it less from a numbers standpoint and more as making a political statement it does seem to work a bit more. The other thing that hasn't been brought up and that I've pondered over a bit in my own work on post-war Germany is that it certainly affected the post-war landscape of the countries that bore the brunt of it. After WW2 it wasn't just the ragged soldiers trailing home out of soviet POW camps that were war weary and shell shocked, it was the whole loving population. The sense of relief in the summer of '45 that it's all loving finally over is palpable in writings from that period. This did a lot to very fundamentally discredit the previous regime and knock the stuffing out of any desire to re-assess the post war borders. Those countries bore very visible physical scars well into the 70s. The exposure of the crimes of the Nazis did a lot to push a pacifist agenda in W. Germany, but the raw physical destruction had a bit role in people not wanting any part of something like that again.
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Apr 20, 2016 20:42
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Cyrano4747 posted:True, but physical violence is the means used to achieve that end unless you are extending "military" out to encompass all of a nation's foreign policy. Whatever your specific aims might be you are going to kill a bunch of people doing it.* "Dehousing" German industrial workers is a perfect example of this. Blowing up the house might be the stated goal, and we can even suspend our cynicism for a bit and say that it is the only goal, but in the real world ca. 1944 you aren't going to do it without killing a fuckload of people. That's also ignoring the fact that when we talk about strategic bombing in WW2 in particular there are a lot of people talking very plainly about killing civilians to terrorize the population into pressing the government for peace. To be clear, I wasn't trying to sanitize the language....imposing your will through violence is exactly what the WWII terror bombing campaigns were, what most battles were, and so on....but that is only one part of a military's "job". There are still a myriad of things that a military - especially a contemporary military - does to enforce their overseer's policy/strategy that are not physical violence. You touched on a big one already: deterrence. I'd go so far as to argue this has been the chief role of first order militaries since the end of WWII. Granted, there is a fine line between the application of force and the threat of force (and it gets finer when you get into the relative perceived viability of the deterrent), but you can still point to a LOT of military activity, especially over the past half century, that involved no physical violence whatsoever yet was done in full support of a nation's strategic objectives. There are a lot of other means as well: building/supporting alliances and partnerships, building and developing sustainment chains, supporting both domestic and international intelligence operations, supporting domestic law enforcement, and so on. That doesn't even really get into the nature of specific missions: for example, though you might have the ability to use lethal force, you might not have the authority to do so, because that isn't in line with the overall objective of the campaign. bewbies fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Apr 20, 2016 |
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Apr 20, 2016 20:45
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bewbies posted:To be clear, I wasn't trying to sanitize the language....imposing your will through violence is exactly what the WWII terror bombing campaigns were, what most battles were, and so on....but that is only one part of a military's "job". There are still a myriad of things that a military - especially a contemporary military - does to enforce their overseer's policy/strategy that are not physical violence. You touched on a big one already: deterrence. I'd go so far as to argue this has been the chief role of first order militaries since the end of WWII. Granted, there is a fine line between the application of force and the threat of force (and it gets finer when you get into the relative perceived viability of the deterrent), but you can still point to a LOT of military activity, especially over the past half century, that involved no physical violence whatsoever yet was done in full support of a nation's strategic objectives. The problem is that while your'e talking about the broad sweep of the military profession and the various roles that it plays in foreign policy across the entire 20th century, most other people in this discussion are narrowly talking about dropping bombs on cities in the 40s, with digressions to dropping bombs on cities in the 60s. I think this is related to our earlier conversations about the ultimate purpose of small arms: you're talking about things from a very high policy and strategy level and most other people here are talking about the more immediate goals and impacts. In this particular discussion you're looking at all of the additional functions a generalized peace time military has, while most of the rest of this thread is examining the specific actions of specific war time militaries. You're right that not every single thing a soldier does at every moment is either killing someone or preparing to kill someone. On the other hand, it could also be argued that a lot of those non-violent activities in support of strategic objectives that you're talking about are only done by militaries because those are the biggest organizations with the manpower and the logistical framework to do regional or even global scale jobs. Take disaster relief as an example. A CVN makes a really loving handy johnny-on-the-spot when an earthquake or tsunami blows the gently caress out of an island nation in the middle of nowhere and it does wonders for the US's international profile, relations with people in the region, developing networks of communication and trust with local officials, etc. That said, there is no reason the job couldn't be done by a non-military except that no one has seen fit to have fleets of humanitarian ships anchored around the world waiting for that kind of poo poo to go down. Legionaries built a fuckload of roads but they weren't established for road construction. At the end of the day the raison d'etre of a military comes back around to projecting deadly force. You can put constraints on it, you can make doctrinal choices that emphasize limiting damage and avoiding confrontation where possible, but in the end it all boils down to violently imposing your will on others or preventing them from imposing theirs on you. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Apr 20, 2016 |
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Apr 20, 2016 21:16
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HEY GAL posted:"ungelegenheit" = "inconvenience," and that's the word a commander will usually use while yelling at dudes for starting poo poo in a civilian town Also very accurate because in most cases, it only meant that some burgher came to the commander to complain and it's a complete waste of time for all involved. Unless the commander happened to be Wallenstein or Gustavus Adolphus and they happened to be in one of their moods.
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Apr 20, 2016 21:23
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Cyrano4747 posted:The other thing that hasn't been brought up and that I've pondered over a bit in my own work on post-war Germany is that it certainly affected the post-war landscape of the countries that bore the brunt of it. After WW2 it wasn't just the ragged soldiers trailing home out of soviet POW camps that were war weary and shell shocked, it was the whole loving population. The sense of relief in the summer of '45 that it's all loving finally over is palpable in writings from that period. This did a lot to very fundamentally discredit the previous regime and knock the stuffing out of any desire to re-assess the post war borders. Those countries bore very visible physical scars well into the 70s. The exposure of the crimes of the Nazis did a lot to push a pacifist agenda in W. Germany, but the raw physical destruction had a bit role in people not wanting any part of something like that again. Wonder how the West German govt managed to get the population sold on the idea that resisting a Soviet occupation with force instead of just folding and not getting nuked to bits was a viable plan.
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Apr 20, 2016 21:24
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Kemper Boyd posted:Unless the commander happened to be Wallenstein...and they happened to be in one of their moods.
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Apr 20, 2016 21:25
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Kemper Boyd posted:Wonder how the West German govt managed to get the population sold on the idea that resisting a Soviet occupation with force instead of just folding and not getting nuked to bits was a viable plan. There was a fair bit of cold-war era opposition to the Bundeswehr and i think it would be hard to argue that even it supporters were anything like as enthusiastic about the notion of armed conflict as previous generations of German military and political leaders. I mean, they went WAAAAAY out of their way to try to break with prior German military traditions, emphasize democratic processes even within a military framework, create structures for refusing orders on a moral basis, etc. The Grundgesetz codified being a CO and while that was more of a tricky proposition earlier on by '83 the Zivildienst was a pretty easy track to get into. Even before then if you really wanted to avoid it all you just moved to West Berlin, something that was never really cracked down on in an official capacity. Then you have a REALLY active anti-war movement that was pretty vocal about how hosed Germany would be if things got hot between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. gently caress, even the DDR had the Bausoldaten for people who didn't want to bear arms. They were much more hosed over through state-sponsored discrimination and future lack of access to education and jobs, but it was still an option.
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Apr 20, 2016 21:37
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Phanatic posted:England also has some pretty toxic libel laws so I'm just gonna go ahead and guess "yes." Yeah, that actually got mostly fixed recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation_Act_2013 Edit: Anyone watched Deutschland 83, btw, talking of the Cold War Bundeswehr? I'm not an expert on the period or anything but I thought it was pretty good.
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Apr 20, 2016 21:37
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lenoon posted:It was only in 1942 that the "dehousing" issue became the policy, essentially for want of anything else to do and in case Bomber Command's resources and money were stripped to supply more directly effective parts of the war effort. It had become clear that RAF tactics were extremely lovely at knocking out German industrial capacity, and so they turned to indiscriminate bombing as an indirect means of destroying capacity. In the course of developing better ways of Its a touch unfair to say that targeted bombing was never adopted due to military inertia, i dont think that the pre war ideals of targeted bombing were really achievable, the USAAF especially (but everyone to some extent) came into the war believing that with the Norden bombsight and their tests over the clear skies and flat plains of the US that they were, and they quickly found that they weren't for a variety of reasons outlined below. The tools developed to find targets at night were adopted by the USAAF to bomb during the day but while it meant they got over the right city bombing anything with precision inside the city was implausible. The RAF did develop squadrons who were capable of precision attacks, the specialist squadrons who bombed the Ems Canal and the Tirpitz or the attacks on the Ruhr dams, (Its probable the USAAF did as well but i don't know a lot about them), and later in the war there was the focus on synthetic oil plants, these were great for hitting the large, defined complexes or battleships that are discrete targets, but factories in cities were a lot less defined. It is impossible to hit manufacturing capacity in the city while leaving the city itself unharmed (with WW2 technology), but when you hit a target with a bomb you have not neccesarily destroyed that target, ideally you want to set it on fire and hit it multiple times repeatedly to ensure that you actually destory the target and allow the fire to burn to render the whole factory a loss, and to disrupt civil defense, to stop firemen putting out the fire and making the area safe, and to achieve that it was best to hit as much of the city at once to overwhelm the cities ability to fix damage and better make damage stick. It is also neccesary to return and keep bombing to stop them repairing it, especially given the fact that lots of german industry existed as distributed smaller producers, they didnt really have the large mass production style factories adopted by the US and Russia, so to hit all of the german production in a city it was neccesary to hit the entire city, ultimately speaking area bombing was effective in destroying german industrial capacity, it became effective at the same time that the RAF and the USAAF started destroying entire german cities. Bombing technology never really got to the point where at night bombers were capable of hitting precision targets other than a large complex at best. One thing that the USAAF discovered is that even in daytime precision bombing is very difficult, firstly due to the industrial haze produced by the areas of Germany they were hitting, the German use of smoke pots to obscure the target, the likelyhood for europe to be cloudy a lot of the time and finally the Luftwaffe putting up fighters to stop them, they didn't really get precision bombing down until they started introducing long range fighter escorts which destroyed the Luftwaffe and allowed the bombers to go unmolested, this meant that they engaged in a lot of what they called blind bombing which is just another word for area bombing. The capability to hit specific parts of german industry didn't appear till very late in the war once they had destroyed the LWF and a great deal of the flak protection had been dismounted and sent to fight tanks on the eastern and western fronts. Even then only on clear days. Dehousing or area bombing of cities kept being used ultimately because it worked, not due to military inertia as they did try to engage in precision bombing, and it was the only really viable strategy to hit the German war effort without invading the continent, it didn't work pre 1942 but that period of time was neccesary to build up the technology and expertise neccesary for it to work eventually (and kept going also for other reasons that you outlined), precision/targeted bombing didnt really work reliably until the introduction of PGM's (even then not neccesarily reliably).
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Apr 20, 2016 21:50
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Polyakov posted:
I agree with all of this, but I would suggest that perhaps military inertia was compounded (or even created) in this case by the strategy outlined by Harris, who had stressed population level bombing as a strategy throughout the war, and then when in place in Bomber Command wouldn't be separated from it, and the mechanics of tit-for-tat (thinking about the Baedecker blitz and retaliation for it here specifically). Fred Taylor's book on Dresden outlines Harris' reluctance to sanction and support targeted infrastructure bombing really well - something about Harris seeing it as a distraction from the real point of bombers, levelling cities (I'd have to check my copy). I'd say that area bombing was ultimately incidentally good at destroying infrastructure and materiel production in cities - but not the only, or perhaps even primary, aim of the policy, which was as Harris wrote, to shorten the war by any means necessary, which to him meant killing civilians and destroying cities. Otherwise, do agree - inertia not the only thing in play there. edit: rephrased with clarifications lenoon fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Apr 20, 2016 |
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Apr 20, 2016 22:06
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Kemper Boyd posted:Wonder how the West German govt managed to get the population sold on the idea that resisting a Soviet occupation with force instead of just folding and not getting nuked to bits was a viable plan. It's a testament to the influence of the old elites that found new niches, now that their carreers in the military were over. The ruptures that Cyrano mentioned were directed against this old order and the generation that was actively taking part in WW2. I'm sure there's alot to be said how antisoviet propaganda connected to the prewar and warpropaganda and the deep running influences of this resounded.
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Apr 20, 2016 22:09
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JaucheCharly posted:It's a testament to the influence of the old elites that found new niches, now that their carreers in the military were over. It probably helped that the issue was always framed as defending against Soviet aggression. There was little, if any, desire to head east and reclaim the lost lands. Even when talking about WWIII the best outcome was always a return to the status quo ante rather than a triumphant march to Moscow to topple the regime.
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Apr 20, 2016 22:28
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Cyrano4747 posted:I mean, they went WAAAAAY out of their way to try to break with prior German military traditions, emphasize democratic processes even within a military framework, create structures for refusing orders on a moral basis, etc. Can you post more about this process?
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Apr 20, 2016 22:29
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lenoon posted:I agree with all of this, but I would suggest that perhaps military inertia was compounded in this case by the strategy outlined by Harris, who had stressed population level bombing as a strategy throughout the war, and then when in place in Bomber Command wouldn't be separated from it, and the mechanics of tit-for-tat (thinking about the Baedecker blitz and retaliation for it here specifically). Fred Taylor's book on Dresden outlines Harris' reluctance to sanction and support targeted infrastructure bombing really well - something about Harris seeing it as a distraction from the real point of bombers, levelling cities (I'd have to check my copy). You are correct in Harris' opposition to what he called Panacea targets, he was 100% behind the idea of the bomber as a war winning weapon when employed in his way (hitting cities) and when he was asked to deviate from that in a major way he objected strenuously, for a lot of the war he was right about sticking to a single aim, for instance there was not a lot of point hitting german oil infrastructure before they were cut off from the Romanian oil wells (in terms of instantly affecting the German ability to fight), but once that did happen and it became clear that it was time to hit infastructure it was very hard to unstick Harris from his main commitment to cities, and it is fair to say that he carried it through to the end of the war when he should have seen the benefits of changing strategy, there were several major spats on the topic, and Eisenhower threatened to resign until Spatz and Harris could get their poo poo together and decide on a target priority for Overlord and theres a set of very agitated memo's between Air Marshal Portal and Harris with Portal trying to convince Harris to commit properly to attacking oil and transport after the invasion of Normandy (with only some success).
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Apr 20, 2016 22:33
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Is it alright if I bitch about http://factcheckarmenia.com in here? It's related to Grigoris Balakian, at least.
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Apr 20, 2016 22:56
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An Armenian buddy of mine complained about them, those guys put up a very, er, tastefoul billboard near the genocide memorial in Boston a couple of weeks ago. .
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Apr 20, 2016 23:06
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Fangz posted:The US dropped twice as many bombs during the Vietnam War as was dropped in WWII. Not shocking considering the war went on for years longer and the individual planes could carry more bombs. This is one of those factoids that always gets used to shock undergrads but doesn't actually mean very much in the end.
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Apr 20, 2016 23:20
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LordSaturn posted:Is it alright if I bitch about http://factcheckarmenia.com in here? It's related to Grigoris Balakian, at least. Burn Turkey to the ground.
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Apr 20, 2016 23:28
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LordSaturn posted:Is it alright if I bitch about http://factcheckarmenia.com in here? It's related to Grigoris Balakian, at least. Bitch away. They're cunts.
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Apr 20, 2016 23:39
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There's a traditional song that I believe is appropriate at this juncture. Do join in if you know the tune, boys and girls! You can stick your loving fact check up your arse You can stick your loving fact check up your arse You can stick your loving fact check Stick your loving fact check You can stick your loving fact check up your arse 100 Years Ago, At The Double Quiiick march! On the 15th of April: In Mesopotamia the start of operations against Bait Isa is postponed due to rain, and both Edward Mousley and Square-Peg are suffering badly with nightmares. The Russian advance on Trebizond continues apace; the Germans recapture the Mound in the Ypres salient; Mr Haig goes to London and is singularly unimpressed by the War Committee; Grigoris Balakian flees his caravan and disappears towards Ayran; Corporal Louis Barthas has been warned to move again, which has everyone deeply worried; idiot son of a Montreal millionaire Clifford Wells has some thoughts on conscription; Maximilian Mugge's heart is really in no condition to allow him to fight as an infantryman; and Bernard Adams considers once more the implications of ordering death dealt out without having to see the consequences. On the 16th of April: The Twin Pimples fall to determined assault, and Kut is one step closer to relief; but Edward Mousley seems to have not allowed himself to get his hopes up. The attack on Trebizond pauses for rest and re-supply; the Lafayette Escadrille is ordered forward to its first active duty station in the Vosges; Louis Barthas is now convinced that he is heading to Verdun; E.S. Thompson makes mention for the first time that the South African infantry is running on Reo Speedwagon; and Malcolm White writes to Evelyn Southwell, mostly about poetry.
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Apr 21, 2016 00:01
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Splode posted:Burn Turkey to the ground. Nah, Turkey can be cool. But the neo-Ottoman masturbators over there, starting with Erdogan, can and should go gently caress themselves.
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Apr 21, 2016 00:43
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