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So, reading this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion_(wargame)quote:The German navy's relative weakness, combined with the Luftwaffe's lack of air supremacy, meant it was not able to prevent the Royal Navy from interfering with the planned Channel crossings. The Navy's destruction of the second invasion wave prevented resupply and reinforcement of the landed troops, as well the arrival of more artillery and tanks. This made the position of the initially successful invasion force untenable; it suffered further casualties during the attempted evacuation. Of the 90,000 German troops who landed only 15,400 returned to France. 33,000 were taken prisoner, 26,000 were killed in the fighting and 15,000 drowned in the English Channel. All six umpires deemed the invasion a resounding failure. How big a defeat is this for Germany? Later in the war they seem to be losing 75,000 people every other month.
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May 22, 2016 20:32
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LowellDND posted:So, reading this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion_(wargame) So at this point in the war nobody's actually been told 'Russia is next' and the German staff are thinking about downsizing the army so the economy doesn't collapse. Instead of course there's a massive expansion and gearing up for twelve months, but there's a big difference between 'staring across the channel stalemate' resulting in Hitler deciding to risk a two-front war and a disaster straight off the bat of the Fall of France - it puts Hitler's judgement into serious question, it maybe makes Stalin feel a lot luckier, etc etc. I think there's a tendency to mock the German staff a bit too hard over the implausibility of Sealion. It's something that literally hadn't been contemplated before June 1940 because the collapse of France was a surprise, as was Britain's refusal to end the war after the fall of France. So Normandy had a good four years of planning and preparation and lessons-learned poured into it. The Germans start thinking about invading England in June, knowing that mid-September is the last possible date at which this idea is remotely plausible. You could get a room full of the greatest military geniuses in history working on the problem and they still wouldn't have come up with anything good.
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May 22, 2016 20:48
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wdarkk posted:Victory through Airpower, right? It's really weird to watch "Walt Disney wants to burn people to death: the movie". Yep. I'm making a blog post on it; I think it lays out the basics of the "pro" strategic bombing argument pretty well. It makes a little more intelligible how the Allies ended up burning down half of Japan, dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities, burned down Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, etc. Though it should be mentioned at least that in the movie, industry is targeted, not civilians. And that (as is often the case with these things) the whole rationale behind the actions is to save lives by shortening the war (and by the film's narrative, anyway) avoid WW1-style wars of attrition.
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May 22, 2016 20:56
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feedmegin posted:I'm not sure I agree, relative to the Luftwaffe. Bear in mind a British pilot shot down and ejecting was probably back in a plane the next day whereas a German one was a PoW. You're right about the downed pilot issue but that is almost statistically insignificant relative to the size of actual training pipelines . The RAF in 1940 was still doing apprenticeship style stuff or, alternatively, Academy kids, and they were hampered not only by obsoletes training methods but also by their ridiculously out of date personnel policies (are you rich? y/n ). the luftwaffe in the summer of 1940 was training about four pilots to the RAF's one , and those pilots were getting roughly twice the flight hours even before the battle. During the battle RAF flight training got down to as low as five or 10 hours , which is kind of ludicrous if you think about it. the luftwaffe also cut back their hours but not nearly so drastically. by late August fighter command was in an incredible manpower pinch , and their replacements were probably less capable than your average flight Sim enthusiast is nowadays minus the obvious issues with the flight Sim nerds' physical fitness. in any case as Cyrano noted that the relative size and efficiency of the training pipelines were by far the most important factor in building and maintaining a core of pilots. Case in point, the numbers in the summer of 1940 are amusingly quaint compared to 1944-45, When the American and Russian juggernauts got fully ramped up . America alone was training more pilots per month then both sides trained during the entirety of the battle of Britain, which was almost three times that of the RAF in 1939. All that being said, the battle as it was fought was basically an academic exercise as the 109's legs would've prevented any significant establishment of air superiority over anywhere but the very south east corner of England, at least until the E7 variant showed up . It is one of the few points in history with the technical capabilities, or lack there of, of a particular bit of gear were genuinely decisive in a strategic sense.
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May 22, 2016 22:36
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bewbies posted:
Even then, at the end of the day it didn't loving matter. You could swap out all the Luftwaffe's 109s with P-51s or, gently caress it, F-86s, give them total dominance of the air for all of 1940, and it still doesn't lead to jackboots on Piccadilly Circus. The luftwaffe could have loving X-Wings and as long as the Kiregsmarine still sucks and the Wehrmacht is still stuck in France things haven't changed all that much. Asking the Germans to get an invasion going in 1940 with a few months lead up time is kind of like wondering whether you could get a man in space with a V-2 in 1944. The inherent problems are just too immense and even if you do manage to technically pull it off all you've accomplished is killing some of your own people. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 23:05 on May 22, 2016 |
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May 22, 2016 23:03
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100 Years Ago 17 May: The French begin chucking shitloads of ordnance at Fort Douaumont; the Germans have been doing some interior decorating inside the fort in case the French might want to come round for afternoon tea; Louis Barthas has yet another terrifying brush with certain death. The Austro-Hungarians are still moving forward at the Battle of Asiago; much political bullshit continues over Salonika; the German U-boats leave port to prepare for the latest German attempt to fight a North Sea battle; Commander Spicer-Simson is about to leave our story; E.S. Thompson marches some more; and Maximilian Mugge's story moves from “interesting portrait of a little-appreciated part of the soldier’s experience” to “absolutely vital record of an obscure and really rather shameful bit of the war”. 18 May: First up, we have the Cliff's Notes version of how the Brusilov Offensive came to be a thing, with all due apologies for short-changing the Eastern Front. The Austro-Hungarians in Italy continue rolling on and on, but I have only nice things to say about how General Cadorna is reacting to this rather major setback (don't worry, it won't last long). Louis Barthas is attacked by Satanic flatulence (I am not making this up); the BEF is now getting some new 8-inch howitzers over to France; and E.S. Thompson is still marching, having just heard the news from the Battle of Kondoa.
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May 22, 2016 23:15
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Cyrano4747 posted:Even then, at the end of the day it didn't loving matter. You could swap out all the Luftwaffe's 109s with P-51s or, gently caress it, F-86s, give them total dominance of the air for all of 1940, and it still doesn't lead to jackboots on Piccadilly Circus. The luftwaffe could have loving X-Wings and as long as the Kiregsmarine still sucks and the Wehrmacht is still stuck in France things haven't changed all that much. I agree, I'm not arguing that sea lion was viable, just that the loss of air superiority over England would've made the battle of the Atlantic, as well as torch and overlord and everything else, a whole lot more difficult.
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May 22, 2016 23:16
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Yeah, I don't either think that even if G.B. Hitler had used the Ark of Covenant to destroy RAF that Germany could have conquered Britain. But multiple battles showed what happens when a WW2 fleets without decent air cover fight against WW2 bombers.
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May 22, 2016 23:30
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Hogge Wild posted:Yeah, I don't either think that even if G.B. Hitler had used the Ark of Covenant to destroy RAF that Germany could have conquered Britain. But multiple battles showed what happens when a WW2 fleets without decent air cover fight against WW2 bombers. Uh, for successful air attacks against ships you need the right kind of bombers with pilots trained in how to attack a moving target at sea. Germany had neither.
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May 22, 2016 23:37
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Why don't tanks use water-cooled machine guns?
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May 22, 2016 23:49
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Xerxes17 posted:Why don't tanks use water-cooled machine guns? It's easier to store HE rounds for the main gun than tanks of water.
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May 22, 2016 23:55
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dublish posted:Stephen Sears has a good one - volume called Gettysburg. Is there a particular reason that Catton isn't mentioned as a source much ? Has his stuff been proven wrong on a lot of stuff or is it just that newer writers have more mindshare these days ?
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May 23, 2016 00:00
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Xerxes17 posted:Why don't tanks use water-cooled machine guns? Interestingly the australian home-built tanks did; the water supply was also used as a supply of (allegedly) potable water to drink because australia is loving boiling.
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May 23, 2016 00:05
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I suspect that if you are firing your coaxial MG on your tank so much as to need water cooling ammo would be a bigger concern. They should bring back water cooled MGs for ships and patrol boats though.
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May 23, 2016 00:13
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Hogge Wild posted:Yeah, I don't either think that even if G.B. Hitler had used the Ark of Covenant to destroy RAF that Germany could have conquered Britain. But multiple battles showed what happens when a WW2 fleets without decent air cover fight against WW2 bombers. Nine days off Dunkirk where destroyers had to stop to perform their tasks and only five were lost to air attack? The same Axis that couldn't stop all of Operation Pedestal is going to somehow stop all of a comparatively massive combat group moving at warship speeds over a much shorter path? There's a really big difference between WW2 fleets without decent air cover and WW2 fleets without decent air cover and an utterly massive difference between WW2 bombers and WW2 bombers. Incidentally what was Germany doing for torp bombers at that point in the war? I recall it being seriously underwhelming. bewbies posted:in any case as Cyrano noted that the relative size and efficiency of the training pipelines were by far the most important factor in building and maintaining a core of pilots. Case in point, the numbers in the summer of 1940 are amusingly quaint compared to 1944-45, When the American and Russian juggernauts got fully ramped up . America alone was training more pilots per month then both sides trained during the entirety of the battle of Britain, which was almost three times that of the RAF in 1939. Do you think this is relevant to the British willingness to sacrifice air wing size for protection when designing their carriers? If their idea of a pilot training process is this slow then it would mean a comparatively small air wing and they were building a lot of decks. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 01:26 on May 23, 2016 |
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May 23, 2016 01:22
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Late Night Spike Milligan Interlude Our hero is in North Africa with the Battery jazz band after a particularly successful concert party, soon to go up to the fighting. quote:To our left the Bay of Algiers was bathed in moonlight. “I never dreamed,” said Harry, “that one day, I would be driven along the Bay of Algiers by moonlight.” If ever I stop being a total sucker for this sort of thing, stage an intervention immediately
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May 23, 2016 01:34
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Trin Tragula posted:
If I fail to incorporate that phrase into my daily repertoire, please do the same for me.
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May 23, 2016 01:53
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xthetenth posted:Incidentally what was Germany doing for torp bombers at that point in the war? I recall it being seriously underwhelming. Not a lot, they didn't have their aerial torpedo developed until 1941 and it was a bit poo poo, they had dud rates of around 50% in testing and it was only in the hands of the KM until 1942, and they were using low performance floatplanes (He115's mainly) that suffered from similar problems as the Swordfish in being slow and vulnerable. The Germans concentrated on dive or level bombing to sink shipping for a very long time. They didn't field anything that could be considered an effective torpedo bomber squadron until 1942 where the LW started to convert Ju88's and He111's (After responsibility for torpedo bombing was traken away from the KM and given to the LW), They bought aerial torpedo's off the Italians for a long time until they perfected their own torpedo. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 02:30 on May 23, 2016 |
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May 23, 2016 02:22
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So to continue my line of questioning. How did Germany pull off the invasion of Norway? It's always seemed to be one of the after thoughts of ww2 and it was really only useful to bottle up 300k some odd German troops that could've been used in Russia.
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May 23, 2016 02:38
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Hello friends. Can anyone recommend a good book about the history of the Cold War?
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May 23, 2016 02:56
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hogmartin posted:If ever I stop being a total sucker for this sort of thing, stage an intervention immediately quote:If I fail to incorporate that phrase into my daily repertoire, please do the same for me. This is my new favorite thing
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May 23, 2016 03:04
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jaegerx posted:So to continue my line of questioning. How did Germany pull off the invasion of Norway? It's always seemed to be one of the after thoughts of ww2 and it was really only useful to bottle up 300k some odd German troops that could've been used in Russia. Short answer? Lots of last minute make-do bullshit that only worked because the landings weren't all that opposed. Yeah, that one cruiser got sunk by shore batteries but most of the "landings" were advance parties of infantry disembarking in orderly fashion from destroyers to secure major ports for cargo vessels They also managed to capture a poo poo ton of Norwegian equipment in the first couple of days when things were still really uncertain, and the Norwegian government didn't give the best of orders to the military. Even so the KM managed to lose a bunch of ships when the brits did their counter-landing at Narvik. It was as best-case an "amphibious invasion" as you can possibly want, and they still lost a good chunk of their surface navy doing it. edit: it makes a lot more sense why they did it in the context of pre-fall of France 1940. Everyone though that the submarine bases were going to be super useful for trying to choke off the brits and the French. Plus, there was a real worry that the brits would move in and gently caress up their transport of iron ore from sweeden. Compared to a hypothetical world where the British take Norway and you have to keep an active defense army on the baltic coast, plus deal with the 8th AF et al flying out of Norway rather than England for part of the year and taking it probably avoided a lot of headaches for them.
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May 23, 2016 03:49
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xthetenth posted:Incidentally what was Germany doing for torp bombers at that point in the war? I recall it being seriously underwhelming. The Luftwaffe had no air-dropped torpedoes, they had not bothered to design one. During the war they got technical assistance from the Italians and the Japanese to design one, but that was a long time after the battle of Britain/operation Sea Lion.
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May 23, 2016 04:39
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Since everyone's talking about World War II Britain, I think this would be an appropriate video to post. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlzH7yP-bHs Long story short, a food critic and comedienne spend a week living the life of a couple under the rationing of World War II England. They live in a period house and clothes, eat correctly made period recipes with the appropriately limited food rations, and experience activities and daily life as they would have under threat of German bombers. The full HD episodes are available on Hulu if you have it.
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May 23, 2016 04:48
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mllaneza posted:Is there a particular reason that Catton isn't mentioned as a source much ? Has his stuff been proven wrong on a lot of stuff or is it just that newer writers have more mindshare these days ? Catton was a writer, journalist, and historian, in roughly that order. He was writing narratives, so there was never really anything to disprove in an academic sense. Which isn't to say that he's a bad writer, just that you can do a lot better if you're looking for historical research (Sears, McPherson, etc.) and you can get a more wide-ranging narrative with Foote.
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May 23, 2016 04:54
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Nebakenezzer posted:The Luftwaffe had no air-dropped torpedoes, they had not bothered to design one. During the war they got technical assistance from the Italians and the Japanese to design one, but that was a long time after the battle of Britain/operation Sea Lion. Did they even have an AP bomb? Because when your most likely way to sink a ship is near misses with bombs to replicate the effects of torpedoes you're in deep trouble.
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May 23, 2016 04:55
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Question about the infamous Action off Samar; I ran into this quote (from the 'the world wonders' article):quote:Halsey, in command of the naval forces covering the invasion, fell for the ruse, and convinced that Northern Force constituted the main Japanese threat, proceeded northward in pursuit with the carriers of 3rd Fleet and a powerful force of battleships, designated Task Force 34. This left the landing beaches covered only by sixteen escort carriers with about 450 aircraft from the 7th Fleet. On the morning of the 25th a strong Japanese force of battleships slipped through the San Bernardino Strait headed toward the American landing forces... Except, isn't that like a fuckload of aircraft? Was that not enough to severely gently caress up the attacking Japanese forces, without desperate sort of stuff from Taffy-3? Or were those actually dispersed throughout a large area or something?
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May 23, 2016 05:05
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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This is another incidence of there being a lot of difference between WW2 planes. 450 aircraft from a fast carrier task force could have given that fleet a hard time (although they probably would have needed a few sorties to deal with the sheer bulk of battleships and number of smaller ships). 450 older planes that were less capable but could fit on escort carriers and only had depth charges and HE bombs? We're back to the planes not having the tools to hurt the ships effectively.
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May 23, 2016 05:15
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World War 2 Data Today's update finishes off the mines and starts the grenades, in the Imperial Japanese inventory. What was one method of mining an airstrip, and what did it involve? What exactly are antiboat mines and where were they used? What did one have to do after pulling the safety pin on a grenade, but before throwing it? How long are the delays on the grenades examined? Check it out at the blog!
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May 23, 2016 05:28
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PittTheElder posted:Question about the infamous Action off Samar; I ran into this quote (from the 'the world wonders' article): IIRC that was dispersed over a fair area (Taffy 1, for example, never saw the Japanese Navy). Equipment was also an issue. There were accounts of aircraft making attack runs without ammo, or attacking with depth charges, etc. There's also issues of availability due to mechanical factors. wdarkk fucked around with this message at 05:38 on May 23, 2016 |
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May 23, 2016 05:30
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xthetenth posted:This is another incidence of there being a lot of difference between WW2 planes. 450 aircraft from a fast carrier task force could have given that fleet a hard time (although they probably would have needed a few sorties to deal with the sheer bulk of battleships and number of smaller ships). 450 older planes that were less capable but could fit on escort carriers and only had depth charges and HE bombs? We're back to the planes not having the tools to hurt the ships effectively. Those 450 planes were a roughly even mix of Wildcats and Avengers. The Wildcat was an older fighter that could carry a couple of 100 lb bombs. It was still effective against Japanese planes, since they hadn't upgraded much. The Avenger was the USN's first line torpedo plane (and huge for a single engine plane) but the escort carriers carried maybe a dozen torpedoes per carrier. 500 lb GP bombs were great against land targets and subs, but even a destroyer could probably survive one hit and still be mission capable. The downside to those 36 torpedo runs they would get to make is that daylight runs against maneuvering warships are very hard. I believe they got a couple of hits, and so did the escorts which contributed a lot. One destroyer could turn back a whole division of battleships without even launching its whole complement of fish. What was missing was the dive bomber. A few hits with 1000 lb AP would badly hurt a heavy cruiser and might scratch a battleship. The Haruna sure didn't have the deck armor to reliably stop a bomb that big from 1500 ft. The hi/low combo of dive bombers and torpedo planes works better at reducing CAP - which wasn't a factor - than in dividing AA fire, but splitting defensive fire can only help the attacker. Air organization almost completely broke down in an attempt to deal with OMG, the whole loving Japanese navy is right over there. There was very little coordination between different groups. There was some impromptu arrangements made in the air, but for much of the day planes were launched as fast as they could be with very little concern to get Avengers from different carriers in the air under a unified command. On benefit from this was that the Japanese ships were under nearly constant air attack, even just a fighter or two strafing the AA gunners. Possibly with empty guns.
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May 23, 2016 05:35
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Also holy loving poo poo was Chikuma unlucky: quote:Chikuma sank from the effect of the air attack, and Nowaki only arrived in time to pick up survivors from the water.[3]
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May 23, 2016 05:41
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wdarkk posted:Also holy loving poo poo was Chikuma unlucky: There was also the cruiser that either sunk or limped away minus a bow due to a carrier's single 5in gun.
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May 23, 2016 05:50
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Xerxes17 posted:Why don't tanks use water-cooled machine guns? Water coolant jackets and tanks take space which is on premium inside tanks. Degtyarev had to design a smaller radius magazine on DT-28 because the wider disc magazine on DP-28 wouldn't fit in the coaxial MG position.
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May 23, 2016 06:39
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Trin Tragula posted:Late Night Spike Milligan Interlude You could still buy V brand cigarettes in Libya in 2011, apparently more popular with the locals than the British military
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May 23, 2016 07:28
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xthetenth posted:Do you think this is relevant to the British willingness to sacrifice air wing size for protection when designing their carriers? If their idea of a pilot training process is this slow then it would mean a comparatively small air wing and they were building a lot of decks. The RAF and the Fleet Air Arm are separate organisations with separate training pipelines (and the British carrier fleet was rather smaller than the US/Japanese) though...
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May 23, 2016 09:40
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Sealion works if you assume that the UK will surrender once the Germans have troops on the ground for a day or so. Couldn't that be the case if Halifax was in charge and not Churchill? Was Halifax that wishy washy?
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May 23, 2016 10:39
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Comstar posted:Sealion works if you assume that the UK will surrender once the Germans have troops on the ground for a day or so. Couldn't that be the case if Halifax was in charge and not Churchill? Was Halifax that wishy washy? Well, Sealion works if the Germans have troops on the ground (in quantity and with ammo and stuff) whoever's in charge. It's always been the case that the British Army is kind of second-string compared to the major continental armies. Conversely if they don't have troops in quantity with some semblance of logistics they get crushed quickly enough that whoever's in charge isn't going to be able to surrender quickly enough before they get pushed into the sea. Would be kind of embarrassing if Halifax tried though - 'oh God we surrender oh whoops we kicked the poo poo out of you can I have backsies'.
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May 23, 2016 10:59
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A day? I find that hard to believe. Actual Germans on the ground would galvanize British resistance, Halifax or not. Tias fucked around with this message at 11:47 on May 23, 2016 |
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May 23, 2016 11:05
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You can't galvanize resistance without tanks, trucks, artillery etc. That's the main thing going for the Germans if] they somehow manage to cross the channel - the first wave might have been light on equipment but not really any less so than the British. Given the GHQ stop line involved being willing to sacrifice the whole south coast then you have a situation where if the luftwaffe gets forward airstrips in Kent and a major port or two is captured intact then the Germans can plausibly reinforce their beachead with heavy equipment far faster than the British army could and they quickly gain the capacity to break out and take London and the rest of the country. I know we're in silly alt history territory here, but my point is that the problem of 'how do we win once we've landed?' was a very different one for the Germans in 1940 than it was for the Allies in 1944. We're very lucky they just never solved any of the problems they had to solve before they got to that point.
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May 23, 2016 11:38
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