Hogge Wild posted:

Agreed. It's my favourite thread on internet.



http://i.imgur.com/DQf4cEr.webm

Deteriorata posted:

There's a bunch of cities name Lafayette, but I bet a lot of people don't know why.

I was always partial to Thaddeus Kosciuszko, myself. The guy who taught Washington how to run an army.

Trin Tragula posted:

100 Years Ago

It's the 24th of April. [url=https://makersley.com/julna-easter-rising-24-apr-1916/]In Ireland, the Easter Rising begins;

Xiahou Dun posted:

Can you feel how the first sound is farther forward in your mouth than the second sound?

Splode posted:

I don't think aircraft performance is necessarily less important than numbers, tactics or skill, as they're all relative. An F86 piloted by a mediocre pilot with limited training could easily defeat 10 ace pilots in sopwith camels (until the F86 ran out of ammo anyway).

Ensign Expendable posted:

That's amazing. Who even makes a 1:35th bear?

Arquinsiel posted:

^^^^
I really wish I hadn't misplaced my teeny Wojtek model. I bought a Flames of War campaign book specifically to get him and he's awesome.

Elyv posted:

So now that we've reached page 1000, I have an important question: did the events described between pages 614 and 911 actually happen?

Elyv posted:

So now that we've reached page 1000, I have an important question: did the events described between pages 614 and 911 actually happen?

Ensign Expendable posted:

There are special rules for Wojtek? That's awesome.

oohhboy posted:

It is a shame Wojtek ended up in a Zoo instead of some Army Barracks.

Hogge Wild posted:

What's the difference?

Hogge Wild posted:

The Lone Badger posted:

That bear looks underage. I don't think they should be giving it beer.

Endman posted:

Don't forget the Lafayette Escadrille from WW1 that just celebrated its centenary!

Ensign Expendable posted:

As long as it actually entered a military, presumably it passed trials and is actually good for something

Grand Prize Winner posted:

Named, of course, after the famous General Escadrille, who helped save the burgeoning American republic during our revolutionary war

xthetenth posted:

The Phantom could kick the poo poo out of the Zero without even trying. The F4F Wildcat, that's mostly true, and is definitely true once the Zero's out of its limited cannon ammo.

EvanSchenck posted:

I defy you to make a better phonetic English spelling for Sylt without using umlauts (aka foreign bullshit letters) or IPA

Arquinsiel posted:

Yeah, but in a stroke of weird they weren't in the book, they were in the Wargames Illustrated that same month. They're actually pretty amazing rules for a 25 point unit attachment.

Deteriorata posted:

There's a bunch of cities name Lafayette, but I bet a lot of people don't know why.

I was always partial to Thaddeus Kosciuszko, myself. The guy who taught Washington how to run an army.

quote:

But here’s where it gets good. For all of the things Von Steuben was not, he what he was is a grizzled life-long soldier with more badass combat experience in his sword arm than a Dynasty Warriors longplay YouTube walkthrough. He’d survived the winter of 1759 in the frozen forests of Poland, roughing it on starvation rations along with 50,000 half-frozen Prussian soldiers. He’d had shrapnel lodged in his body in several places, been hit in the head with a sword, and could run through the world’s intense military drills on his way to the loving bathroom. He took one look at this rag-tag band of American patriots, decided “no European army could have held together in such circumstances,” and went about hardening these backwoods farmers into a razor-sharp spear of liberty.

He did this by personally standing out there in the knee-deep snow with full dress uniform and a rifle, single-handedly demonstrating to the men how to work their weapons and then swearing at them with an unending withering stream of drill sergeant-grade profanity every time they hosed up.

Drills started before dawn, and the Baron Von Steuben ran these demoralized American troopers through the first Boot Camp in U.S. history. Screaming and swearing like a motherfucker, Von Steuben would start cursing in German, switch to French, and then start making up colorful new compound swear words using whatever broken English he could cobble together. When he ran out of curses for those loving cocktoasters, he would snap his fingers, and his adjutant (a German-American), would come running up, get right up in the gently caress-up soldier’s face and start screaming at him using English swear words. Drill took place twice a day, and was designed to teach the men to march in lock-step, load their loving rifles quickly, fight off bayonet attacks, kick someone’s rear end in hand-to-hand combat, and completely and utterly crush the ego of every man in that army until they started thinking of themselves as American soldiers first and nothing else second.

It might sound insane, but the Baron Von Steuben was actually massively popular with the soldiers he was kicking the crap out of. For starters, the idea of a Major General running the drill was completely unheard of – British officers believed it was “ungentlemanly” to get down and dirty with the men, so they never did this. And as for the screaming and swearing, it kind of became a piece of performance art – guys would show up to watch drill just to marvel at this guy’s ridiculous vocabulary of profanity. Also, Von Steuben made a point of learning the name of every soldier in the Army – after he was done crushing their egos and hammering them out into soldiers, he re-built them back up to have pride for their abilities. This is the same strategy used in basic training across the U.S. military today.

Two things that Von Steuben really focused on were loading the musket and fighting with bayonets. The Americans were tough fighters, but Von Steuben was loving appalled by how long it took these assholes to load their loving rifles. So, all day every day he had his men go through the procedure of loading and firing a musket. They didn’t actually shoot them – they didn’t have enough ammo to waste – but he drilled this into them so the soldiers could prime the powder, ram a musketball, and fire in their sleep. He also was loving pissed off when he heard stories of how the Americans were terrified of British bayonet charges (mostly because the Americans didn’t have a lot of bayonets). Steuben freaked the gently caress out, requisitioned any bayonet he could find (there were a bunch of them just starting to be imported from France), and taught these guys how to kick the poo poo out of anyone by jabbing them in the loving eye with a steel spike mounted to the muzzle of a firearm. By the time he was done, these guys could march, wheel, fire by company, reload twice as fast as before, and then charge bayonets into the enemy.

Baron Von Steuben had arrived to find a demoralized, under-equipped, poorly-prepared group of farmers. It took him four months to make them an Army.

Von Steuben eventually wrote his instructions down, in French, and they were translated to English by Alexander Hamilton and Nathaneal Greene. Known originally as “BARON STEUBEN’S INSTRUCTIONS,” it was eventually renamed “Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States” and was in use by the U.S. Army until 1814.

Another highly-important but less-sexy accomplishment of Von Steuben was that he got the camp at Valley Forge whipped into shape as well. He was appalled at the conditions in camp, and ordered those sons-of-bitches to clean that poo poo up. He kept track of supplies, demanded monthly inspections of equipment stores, and any guy who failed to keep his rifle appropriately maintained found himself getting his rear end kicked with a Prussian jackboot. His efforts reduced disease in the camp by a significant margin, and by the time he wrote his last camp report in May 1778 there were only three muskets in the entire Continental army that were listed as “deficient.”

The British had ended the campaigns of 1777 by crushing the American army at the Battles of Brandywine and Germantown, smashing George Washington’s troops with elite Imperial discipline and the tip of the bayonet.

When they encountered that same army at the Battle of Monmouth in May 1778, they were shocked as gently caress when the Continentals stood strong and turned back a British cavalry and bayonet charge.

- See more at: http://badassoftheweek.com/index.cgi?id=489480128466#sthash.X9fblmPV.dpuf

Tias posted:

I'm going to hand the rest of the description over to Badass of the Week:

quote:

Lockhart's biography tells of von Steuben's being summoned from Paris for Karlsrube, at the court of the Margrave of Baden, for a military vacancy. But, Lockhart notes, "what he found waiting for him at Karlsrube was not an officer's commissioner but a rumor, a horrible, vicious rumor" that the Baron had "taken familiarities with young boys."

Those allegations were fueled by von Steuben's close ties to Prince Henry and Frederick the Great, also "widely rumored to be homosexual."

Von Steuben returned to Paris, and Franklin had a choice here — and he decided von Steuben's expertise was more important to the colonies than his sexuality. While it can be debated how much a part Franklin played in the recruitment of von Steuben, one cannot doubt that one of the most informed people at the French court would know of the allegations against the baron. With that knowledge, and with von Steuben about to be jailed, Franklin, along with Deane, wrote what must be the nation's first example of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" as they mutually signed a recommendation letter to Gen. Washington that embellished von Steuben's military expertise and titles and suggested he had been recommended by various princes and "other great personages." Most surprisingly, it remarked that "his distinguished character and known abilities were attested to by two judges of military merit in this country."

The judges of character that Franklin referred to were two of the four involved in the plot to bring von Steuben to America, along with Franklin and Deane, and personal friends of the baron: Pierre Beaumarchais, author of the "Figaro" plays and an arms dealer who supplied arms for the ship von Steuben eventually sailed on, and Claude Louis, Comte de Saint-Germain, the minister of war under Louis XVI.

What the letter didn't mention was that he was about to be arrested and appear before judges in France.

Franklin, working with Deane, decided von Steuben's "affections" were less important than what he, Washington and the colonies needed to win the war with England. Deane learned of von Steuben's indiscretions — and that the French clergy was investigating — from a letter to the Prince of Hechingen, which read in part:

"It has come to me from different sources that M. de Steuben is accused of having taken familiarities with young boys, which the laws forbid and punish severely. I have even been informed that that is the reason why M. de Steuben was obliged to leave Hechingen and that the clergy of your country intend to prosecute him by law as soon as he may establish himself anywhere."

The proof of Franklin and Deane's knowledge lies in the letter to Washington recommending von Steuben and their quick action to secure the baron from France. So in September 1777, von Steuben boarded a 24-gun ship named Heureux — but, for this voyage, the ship's name was changed to Le Flamand, and the baron's name was entered onto the captain's log as "Frank." And he was on his way to the colonies.

FAUXTON posted:

I'm imagining an F-4 Phantom just cruising past a loving Zero at Mach 2 and torching the drat thing with its exhaust.

The Lone Badger posted:

That bear looks underage. I don't think they should be giving it beer.

SlothfulCobra posted:

Naval warfare is where a technological advantage seemed to really change everything. With infantry, it's hard to get around the fact that the same methods of killing a person generally work out, but when firearms came around, all of a sudden the age old strategy of ramming and boarding isn't an option.

feedmegin posted:

Ehhh, not really. Ramming was still viewed as a thing in the 19th century, especially after the Monitor vs Merrimack/Virginia fight in the US Civil War where neither side's firearms could dent the other's armour, whereas Merrimack rammed the gently caress out of the USS Cumberland.

MikeCrotch posted:

I'm imagining the F-4 spotting the Zero from beyond visual range but realising he can't plink it with a Sparrow due to restrictive Rules of Engagement

Randomcheese3 posted:

I'd argue that the 1866 Battle of Lissa between the Austrians and Italians was more influential in establishing ramming in 19th Century naval thought. At the battle, the Austrians rammed and sank two Italian ironclads. The Italians, who mainly relied on gunnery, sank nothing in return. Being both closer to home, and a more direct demonstration of the power of ramming, Lissa was much more important than Hampton Roads to the European navies.

Panzeh posted:

I believe the brief period of ramming supremacy in that era was the result of artillery not really being up to part with armor for that brief time until large guns with armor piercing/explosive shells showed up.

Tomn posted:

I can't help but think that at least some small part of the enthusiasm for ramming probably had to do with classically-educated Victorian officers having themselves a geekgasm at the thought that they could now justify living out all their deepest Homeric fantasies.

Tomn posted:

I can't help but think that at least some small part of the enthusiasm for ramming probably had to do with classically-educated Victorian officers having themselves a geekgasm at the thought that they could now justify living out all their deepest Homeric fantasies.

Forums Terrorist posted:

Kulik was also scum in general. Hated tanks, hated submachine guns, hated minefields, basically thought all warfare should be reenactments of 1918, and was butt-buddies with Stalin for most of his career so he only got what was coming to him after he bitched about Stalin taking all the credit post-war.

JcDent posted:

I was wondering: do we have cases of guys who were totally, massively, unrelentingly wrong about some tactics or equipment changing opinion after war proves them wrong and going "yep, I was extremely wrong" in memoirs or something?

Panzeh posted:

I believe the brief period of ramming supremacy in that era was the result of artillery not really being up to part with armor for that brief time until large guns with armor piercing/explosive shells showed up.