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Calvin Johnson Jr. posted:I have a couple WW2 questions if one of you guys wouldn't mind answering: 1. The Calais deception was pretty useful, as it stalled the deployment of Panzer forces towards the actual invasion point. How effective the tanks would've been against the amphibious landings depends on how much interdiction the Allies could've performed against them, but they certainly didn't have a lot of tanks and support on the ground. 2. Stalingrad WAS targeted by Stuka bombings, but its hard to bomb stuff hidden in a giant maze of burnt out buildings. Otherwise, I don't quite understand the question? Stalingrad was a giant meatgrinder, and one could argue that a lot of men and materiel were devoted to taking it, and then holding it foolishly when they were eventually surrounded and wiped out. The evacuation of Stalingrad actually cost the Germans a lot in terms of valuable transport aircraft, the Ju-52, which they couldn't quite produce in sufficient numbers.
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May 9, 2016 21:06
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Calvin Johnson Jr. posted:What I'm basically asking is if precision bombing in support of an armored ground force have been preferable to just turning the whole city into rubble and fighting through that? City fighting with tanks would have been murder on the tanks regardless of the amount of air support. Molotov cocktails, anti-tank rifles, etc, would've made any sort of concentrated armor push, in the city itself, a hazardous affair for their crews.
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May 9, 2016 21:13
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Calvin Johnson Jr. posted:I have a couple WW2 questions if one of you guys wouldn't mind answering: Could you elaborate your question with a general outline of how you think the battle of Stalingrad played out? It would help us understand your question better.
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May 9, 2016 21:20
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Calvin Johnson Jr. posted:I meant Stukas in support of tanks on the ground. If they pushed them back to the east bank wouldn't that have made bombing a bit easier/give the targets less shelter or am I way off here? Ground attack aircraft tend to attack formations of enemy vehicles to try and get them to scatter and block the road, get stuck in mud, take some time to regroup, etc. Now say you have a bunch of infantry dug in inside a city. How are strafing runs supposed to help? Are you going to call a Stuka to bomb a single building where you meet resistance? By the time it arrives, your target will be gone. Plus good luck indicating exactly what building you want gone to a pilot. Look at what the Soviets did in Berlin. Instead of precision bombing like you're suggesting, they brought in a ton of high caliber artillery and combined arms demolition teams to rearrange the landscape as they saw fit.
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May 9, 2016 21:33
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Remember that at best your instructions to the airstrike originally sound like "bomb tank at intersection X", and then operationally become "drop bombs at intersection", which strategically ends up being "some bombs got dropped possibly in the same place as some guys saw a tank". Stalingrad was hosed up beyond any recognition, and tanks could hide from air strikes almost as well as infantry.
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May 9, 2016 22:00
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I'm really just questioning if the Germans could have taken Stalingrad through alternative means or was it a lost cause to begin with?
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May 9, 2016 22:02
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Calvin Johnson Jr. posted:I'm really just questioning if the Germans could have taken Stalingrad through alternative means or was it a lost cause to begin with? I'm sure you could construct a scenario where Stalingrad didn't turn out the way it did but that's dependent on things other than tactical decisions inside the city. The flanks not folding when the foreign troops were hit by the Red Army's counterattack would be a big one, as would the Soviets not prioritizing holding Stalingrad and feeding massive resources into it. Even then, getting the city does gently caress all for you. Any kind of success in that operation is predicated on a big break out that rushes into the oil fields in the hinterland, and that's wildly optimistic on the level of "what if the Germans manage to take Moscow and then advance 500 miles further in 1941?" edit: Really the failure of Stalingrad was the sum of a whole poo poo ton of factors leading up to it. Think of it like the tide: the ocean doesn't stop because one specific rock was the point it couldn't cross, it stops where it does because of a massive host of variables ranging from the time of year, the weather, the geometry of the coast in that area, etc.
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May 9, 2016 22:06
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Could you elaborate your question with a general outline of how you think the battle of Stalingrad played out? It would help us understand your question better. I understand it was a huge meat grinder in terms of men/materials used. The goal was to get a line to the oil fields. I know the German's had them pushed back to the volga but got hosed by a counter-offensive that encircled them.
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May 9, 2016 22:09
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Stalingrad was not this close run thing. 'What if the Germans win Stalingrad' isn't about the panzers advancing a bit further or something. It's about making the million men and thousand tanks that would launch Operation Uranus somehow evaporate.
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May 9, 2016 22:09
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In terms of getting to the oil, taking one bank of the Volga didn't mean all that much as far as I remember. You take one half of the city and you're still at the end of a loooooong supply chain with a significant chunk of the red army circling round your flanks and another chunk sat across the river just waiting for a chance to punish you if you try to extend beyond your foothold.
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May 9, 2016 22:11
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Thanks for clearing that up, sorry if those were dumb questions. I didn't know if actually crossing the Volga would've done them any good if they had rolled past Stalingrad but considering the size of Operation Uranus it seems like they'd have been met with hell regardless.
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May 9, 2016 22:12
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Calvin Johnson Jr. posted:Thanks for clearing that up, sorry if those were dumb questions. Don't be.
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May 9, 2016 22:13
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They weren't dumb questions. That's part of what this thread is for.
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May 9, 2016 22:16
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Calvin Johnson Jr. posted:Thanks for clearing that up, sorry if those were dumb questions. I didn't know if actually crossing the Volga would've done them any good if they had rolled past Stalingrad but considering the size of Operation Uranus it seems like they'd have been met with hell regardless. They weren't dumb questions. Here's the map in November 1942:  Even if the Axis troops had conquered the city, their flanks would have been open for this: 
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May 9, 2016 22:25
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MrMojok posted:They were questions. That's part of what this thread is for.
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May 9, 2016 22:33
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Calvin Johnson Jr. posted:I have a couple WW2 questions if one of you guys wouldn't mind answering: IMO: 1. The Calais deception was very helpful, but the whole battle didn't hinge on it. The strategy of the Germans was to place most of its best troops/armored divisions along Calais/Belgium/ the Netherlands to deny the Allied forces ports with which to land supplies. The Germans (logically) figured Allied Forces would have major logistic issues in the big invasion, as well as the Luftwaffe/ Kriegsmarine being able to sink lots of Allied Ships. In that respect, allied preparations like the "Mulberry" portable harbors and the "Pewter" flexible fuel piping were just a critical surprise as their choice of landing zones. The D-Day invasion was a real battle of attrition, and had the Germans re-positioned their tanks, that attrition would have been worse, but the Allied landing forces had many advantages that would have soon nullified that. For example, the Germans really couldn't charge the D-day beaches with lots of tanks; close to the coast, the Allied Navy could have shelled the tanks with impunity. The Allied Air Forces were so dominant in the air D-day onward that the Luftwaffe withdrew rather than fight, and German forces still would have been bombed and strafed without mercy. Put it this way: A heavy tank battalion of King Tigers fought in Normandy. Fighting against British and Canadian troops, they proved a stubborn obstacle - until the Allies sent a fleet of heavy bombers against them, wiping out one formation of King Tigers and badly damaging the rest. (This later produced a photo of Eisenhower inspecting a King Tiger, flipped over and sitting in the bottom of a bomb crater at least as deep as the King Tiger was tall.) So, yeah, it was a brutal battle and every bit helps, but the Allies would have rolled with it. 2. To be honest, I don't know of any way the Germans could have won Stalingrad. Actually, no, I can totally imagine a scenario where the Germans end up in control of the city (I mean, they almost did anyway) but I can't imagine where this result 1) matters and 2) doesn't result in their poo poo getting kicked in as per history. Despite how huge a battle it was, Stalingrad itself was not worth very much strategically. It was just as Case Blue went well, Hitler upgraded the job of one of his armies from protecting the flank of his main thrust south to taking this city named after Stalin. And then as the battle went on, Hitler kept ignoring his generals (who saw more or less immediately how hard it was to supply the army at Stalingrad, let alone the danger of being flanked and encircled) and kept saying "ALL IN" and Stalin was obliging as fighting an urban battle played to the strengths of the Red Army at the time, and removed several critical advantages from the Germans. So yeah, as EE has said, if you want to fight a urban battle, best do it the way the Soviets did Berlin. Changing around what kinda airplanes you use changes very little. Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 22:50 on May 9, 2016 |
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May 9, 2016 22:43
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Beevor is pretty clear (and I don't think that there's any disagreeing with this) that the major blunder Paulus made was in taking his tanks into the city. Assuming you are in the German command and can't do anything about Hitler splitting AGS into AGA and AGB, the next chance you have to avert disaster is to use 6th Army's attached Panzer divisions to get the Axis line onto the Volga for as far as possible. A wide open southern flank isn't actually a massive problem because at the Germans showed time and again in 1943 and even 1944, even a division or two of mobile armoured reserves were completely capable of turning a Soviet offensive on it's head. But you need to have those reserves.
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May 9, 2016 22:51
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lenoon posted:The George Baker saga. Currently catching up on the final entry, but I just wanted to say thank you very much for all of this. This has been one of my favorite reads from this thread.
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May 9, 2016 23:11
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How did people accurately aim ACW era cannons? Were there sights? Did they whip out protractors and do some envelope math? Were they just really used to how their cannons worked?
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May 9, 2016 23:26
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Alchenar posted:Beevor is pretty clear (and I don't think that there's any disagreeing with this) that the major blunder Paulus made was in taking his tanks into the city. Assuming you are in the German command and can't do anything about Hitler splitting AGS into AGA and AGB, the next chance you have to avert disaster is to use 6th Army's attached Panzer divisions to get the Axis line onto the Volga for as far as possible. It was a huge unforced error. Trading the main hedge against disaster for a very slight improvement in the odds of success only makes sense if the operation is certain to win the war in a stroke, and even then is likely a mistake. One of the biggest problems the Nazis (and a decent amount of historiography) seemed to have was overestimating how close they were to victory. As an example, Moscow is often represented as the Germans getting stopped just short of the city in terms that make it sound like that would mean victory in itself rather than a battle that would be Stalingrad with a subway system.
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May 9, 2016 23:44
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Nebakenezzer posted:(This later produced a photo of Eisenhower inspecting a King Tiger, flipped over and sitting in the bottom of a bomb crater at least as deep as the King Tiger was tall.) I had to find this picture, and while what I came up with isn't precisely as described, it's still cool as hell: 
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May 9, 2016 23:52
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How many german aircraft vs. allied are we talking here? I know the US had superiority but can anyone tell me the figures? I guess so much was diverted to the east that there wasn't that much left?
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May 10, 2016 00:03
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Calvin Johnson Jr. posted:How many german aircraft vs. allied are we talking here? I know the US had superiority but can anyone tell me the figures? I guess so much was diverted to the east that there wasn't that much left?
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May 10, 2016 00:34
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Calvin Johnson Jr. posted:Thanks for clearing that up, sorry if those were dumb questions. I didn't know if actually crossing the Volga would've done them any good if they had rolled past Stalingrad but considering the size of Operation Uranus it seems like they'd have been met with hell regardless. There are no dumb questions. (Although Cyano could probably show us a few from his experience as a teacher.) 
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May 10, 2016 00:49
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We're now about ten days behind; I offer into evidence Exhibit D, the large piece of ceiling which quite literally was about five yards from falling on my head the other day. 100 Years Ago 30 April: Another gas raid on the Western Front, this one at Wulverghem, as back in London, moves are afoot to shunt Lord Kitchener, who may still be minister of war but who currently looks like nothing so much as an appendix in the anatomy of the British war effort, off on a diplomatic mission to Russia. A German grenadier (nobody tell the Grenadier Guards!) talks about what passes for "morale" at Verdun these days; in Africa the march to Kondoa is still still going on, and it's still an emergency; Edward Mousley has mostly stopped complaining about a few technical breaches of the laws of war by Ottoman soldiers; Louis Barthas tries to have a quiet bottle of beer and game of cards, and ends up getting the arsehole from his colonel; Evelyn Southwell has been issued a small dose of common sense with his captaincy; and Bernard Adams takes the job description "Sniping Officer" as literally as possible. 1 May: No Bank Holidays in the war. Time for a major strategic rethink in the Middle East; for the British Empire this is "Turtle for nine months and hope they don't attack", and obligingly, Enver Pasha is about to get his army stuck balls deep into Persia instead. General Nivelle has taken over direct command at Verdun, which no doubt will require some dull promotion ceremony. In St Omer a much-maligned man (no, not Haig) is making some cromulent observations; Herbert Sulzbach returns to the war and continues his tour of all the really cushy jobs; Louis Barthas is being offered the chance to visit the divisional showers (do you think he might find something to complain about?); Clifford Wells moves camps and goes up in the pecking order to get his brains blown out for the King; and Maximilian Mugge continues to show strong potential for a future entry in the Grognard Stakes at Longchamps. PS: Valiant Hearts ruled
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May 10, 2016 00:54
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Klaus88 posted:There are no dumb questions. (Although Cyano could probably show us a few from his experience as a teacher.) Nah, I go way out of my way when dealing with students to assure them that there is no such thing, up to and including encouraging them to ask questions they might think are offensive. Even the craziest notion rooted in half-baked, "learned it from my grandpappy" racism can be unpacked into a useful teaching moment. THe best one like that I can think of is the Chinese exchange student in one my Holocaust courses. He wanted to know how we knew we could trust all of the sources on the Holocaust. Couldn't it all just be a Jewish conspiracy to make them look good in the media and in front of other countries? He wasn't a denier or a closet anti-semite, he was just a kid who had lived in the chinese system his whole life and then had his mind blown when exposed to American media and unfettered internet. He realized quickly just how much of what he had been fed his whole life was government bullshit and turned into a hard core cynic and skeptic. He was also learning a lot of lovely stuff about what the Israeli state was doing re: Palestinians, so he wasn't coming at it from the same angle a lot of western kids are who are steeped in Holocaust commemorations from middle school on. He did well in the class. I've always wondered what he did after college. Somehow I don't think his new found attitudes would fly very well in Xi Jinping's China.
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May 10, 2016 00:58
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Trin Tragula posted:PS: Valiant Hearts ruled Oh god that ending 
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May 10, 2016 01:01
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spoilery as all gently caress, seriously do not watch this if you think you might ever play a cute cartoon puzzler about La Grande Guerre which re-imagines the Taxis of the Marne as a driving level to the tune of the Can-Can (for balance: screw the war, let's dance)
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May 10, 2016 01:04
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I am looking for resources regarding the aftermath of defeat or victory on the battlefield in Europe, preferably after the first century AD and before 9th century AD. I want to read something to get a taste of the ashes in someone's mouth after a sack or victory and jubilee when ransacking a place.
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May 10, 2016 01:06
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Thanqol posted:How did people accurately aim ACW era cannons? Were there sights? Did they whip out protractors and do some envelope math? Were they just really used to how their cannons worked? They had sights, quadrants, levels, trig tables and lots of other stuff for aiming them. Artillery had been around for hundreds of years by then, so it was a pretty sophisticated operation. Here's the handbook of artillery from 1863: http://www.civilwarartillery.com/books/robertshandbookofartillery.htm
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May 10, 2016 01:13
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lenoon posted:I thought "tanks in the desert!!!" Until I remembered that did actually happen. Were so many Fokker triplanes painted red though? Dunno why but I always thought that was just Richtofen. Probably the influence of Peanuts there tbh. DID SOMEONE SAY WORLD WAR ONE PLANE PAINT SCHEMES? Only Richthofen's plane (probably) would have been totally red, but it's easy to see why the game's designers would want to shove one of the truly iconic things of the air war in there. His squadron, however, had red as a predominant theme, but it was mostly just the engine cupola. Werner Voss had the coolest Fokker Dreidecker though, and I still think he was cooler than Richthofen   It's a creepy face!
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May 10, 2016 01:21
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I love the WW1 planes that have the name of the pilot in huge bold letters. "Yeah, I'm Baron von Fett, whaddya gonna do, shoot me down?" 
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May 10, 2016 01:31
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Calvin Johnson Jr. posted:How many german aircraft vs. allied are we talking here? I know the US had superiority but can anyone tell me the figures? I guess so much was diverted to the east that there wasn't that much left? Well, wikipedia gives this number: quote:Given the Allied air supremacy (4,029 Allied aircraft assigned to operations in Normandy plus 5,514 aircraft assigned to bombing and defence, versus 570 Luftwaffe planes stationed in France and the Low Countries,
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May 10, 2016 01:54
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I've learned from this thread that the Nazi industrial base had a lot of potential production capacity that they slowly realized over time in response to losses from Allied strategic bombing (working multiple shifts, etc). Would it have helped them in any way to have cranked up production to extreme levels far earlier, or where they limited by manpower/raw materials/something else?
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May 10, 2016 02:10
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david_a posted:I've learned from this thread that the Nazi industrial base had a lot of potential production capacity that they slowly realized over time in response to losses from Allied strategic bombing (working multiple shifts, etc). Would it have helped them in any way to have cranked up production to extreme levels far earlier, or where they limited by manpower/raw materials/something else? Almost certainly. The Nazis didn't fully mobilise their industrial capacity until 1944, at which point it was far too late. If they had utilised their factories to their limit in '41, for example, they probably could have rolled over Moscow before their supply lines were completely destroyed by the mud of the Russian Autumn and then frozen by General Winter. That said, though, they probably would have run out of oil shortly after and the result may not have been as different as you'd think.
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May 10, 2016 02:38
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Endman posted:The Nazis didn't fully mobilise their industrial capacity until 1944, at which point it was far too late. This isn't actually true. The problem was that there just weren't enough Germans to meet the manpower demands of the armed forces and the industries needed to keep the armed forces going. From 1941 onwards, apart from some rationalizations, most of the expansion of Germany's industrial capacity came from either exploiting the industrial output of occupied Europe, or from an ever increasing slave labor force. There's no real way the Germans were ever going to win Barbarossa without some major Gay Black Hitler poo poo happening. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 04:11 on May 10, 2016 |
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May 10, 2016 04:09
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Endman posted:DID SOMEONE SAY WORLD WAR ONE PLANE PAINT SCHEMES? What Battlefield 1 really needs to do is let players create custom plane camos and logos, and when you get into a plane it instantly changes to your custom design so you can play a fighter ace with some wacky poo poo out of War Thunder.
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May 10, 2016 04:48
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chitoryu12 posted:What Battlefield 1 really needs to do is let players create custom plane camos and logos, and when you get into a plane it instantly changes to your custom design so you can play a fighter ace with some wacky poo poo out of War Thunder. Nothing gets me into the spirit of WWI like a Sopwith Camel covered in anime schoolgirls.
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May 10, 2016 04:51
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david_a posted:I've learned from this thread that the Nazi industrial base had a lot of potential production capacity that they slowly realized over time in response to losses from Allied strategic bombing (working multiple shifts, etc). Would it have helped them in any way to have cranked up production to extreme levels far earlier, or where they limited by manpower/raw materials/something else? There are a few odd things about how the nazi economy worked that would have made it difficult to amp up production earlier in the war, while it certainly would have helped I don't think they had the potential to make a huge difference. The first oddity is that an awful lot of the German armaments miracle was created by working forced laborers to death who were taken from the east, this source of manpower was not available to them until 1941/42, so Germany didn't really have a whole lot of manpower to throw around for this, and other, reasons. The second reason, also related to manpower, is that the German economy was heavily agrarian, they needed about 20% of their population working to feed the rest, as unlike Britain it could not import, and unlike the US it didn't have the huge land reserves for truly efficient industrial farming, indeed the German farming population was roughly equal to the US and around nine times larger than the UK. It couldn't use these men to produce, and until they could employ captive foreign labour or just take the grain from the Ukraine and starve the people of Western Russia they needed these people back at their farms. The third is that Germany overall didn't have enough men, due to a quirk of dates the generation maturing in WW2 were the kids born in WW1, and there weren't as many of them for obvious reasons, and Germany had to have a huge force to invade Russia, give or take half of all potential German men were in uniform or in training in 1941, with 20% ish unsuitable and 30% ish essential for the economy, if they wanted to man more factories thy either needed to employ women, which wasn't an option at that stage, or compromise their armies size. There was already time listed call up of essential armaments personnel to fill gaps, they needed to knock out Russia fast just so those men could go back to making weapons to fight the UK and US. In the early war Germany was already feeling resource shortage, in late 1940 there was a lot of shuffling of the steel rations allocated to the parts of the armed forces, most of this cut was exported to try and maintain the balance of trade with neutral/allied countries, (Finland, Sweden, Spain, Romania etc.) Germany was not rich enough to buy and hadn't taken enough resources by force to be able to avoid this, to get that steel back and more on top to produce more weapons would have been a difficult sell to Germanies remaining trading partners, who she was very keen on keeping. Finally there was the question of time, pre war production would have been hard to increase, Germany was defaulting on debt and reparation payments already, so needed to keep up exports to try to balance it's books as it was still a part of the world economy, and didn't have the spare manpower to engage in a huge expansion of arms production over what it already did. So any change would be happening post 1939, and the problems above were still there, Germany had around 7 million men in uniform to invade France, it planned to demobilise them to produce arms only to remobilise them to prepare for Barbarossa so that increase never happened, they needed every man to try and defeat the Russians given the disparity in population. It takes significant time to increase production, to train new workers, set up new lines etc. Germany didn't have the manpower or the resources to do that until she grabbed both of those, the armaments workers who were German continued to be called up to fight but from 1942 onwards lots of forced labor came in to replace it, in 1942 roughly a quarter of a million German armaments workers were called up, but a million foreign workers were brought West to replace them, and that was the condition that allowed the expansion of German armament production alongside the massive manpower drain that fighting Russia and holding Britain at bay took, before that point I don't think Germany could have made any game changing gains as it just didn't have the resources to do so. Though having an all encompassing ministry for production much earlier certainly wouldn't have hurt.
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May 10, 2016 05:08
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Also there's the whole Dolchstoßlegende thing. There was a very definite limit to how much the Nazis were willing to push a war economy until it was too late because they weren't sure of civilian support if the home front got too bad.Endman posted:Almost certainly. I mentioned this earlier but I strongly doubt the Germans could have rolled over Moscow in its entirety, a city like that is very hard to totally take even in the face of relatively light opposition, as Stalingrad shows. Cyrano4747 posted:Nah, I go way out of my way when dealing with students to assure them that there is no such thing, up to and including encouraging them to ask questions they might think are offensive. Even the craziest notion rooted in half-baked, "learned it from my grandpappy" racism can be unpacked into a useful teaching moment. Even if you could call the question stupid, that same question phrased as silence is a whole lot stupider, because a stupid question is by definition not asked from knowledge. Also, you're giving the entire audience the tools to properly discuss the topic and that can percolate from them. The rest of the class might have known that of course the Holocaust is well documented but not had the rock solid evidence easily at hand before.
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May 10, 2016 05:35
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