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I just want to say that immediately pre-WWII the French had the best tanks in the world. I guess you could count the Czech tanks that the Germans captured as better, but that isn't really supportive of the Superior Aryan MIC narrative.
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May 27, 2016 13:49
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Would that be true even during the Invasion of France? Didn't the germans have a relatively low number of Panzer IVs during the invasion?
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May 27, 2016 14:16
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Most French tanks had the commander also be the gunner, where in German tanks post the Pz II they tended to be separate (which makes for much better situational awareness and also much better actual...commanding, especially when considering the platoon commander), and they also had reliability and/or speed issues. Also, for the most part, no radios. Much like when we talk about Shermans versus Tigers, the armour and gun aren't the be-all and end-all...
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May 27, 2016 14:27
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The History Extra (not at all like Extra History) podcast had a really cool episode where they interviewed Naval Lord Alan West (no, not Allen West) about Jutland. Spoiler alert: he doesn't think too highly of Beatty's brashness. Manages to take the uniquely British tack of making GBS threads on Beatty while not outwardly appearing to do so because ~lordship~. It's relatively brief, but he does a good job of pointing out that even the best days on the North Sea are lovely, they didn't have GPS or lasers, and that Jellicoe was faced with the possibility of losing the British fleet by going after the German fleet, thereby seeing the blockade fail and Germany potentially winning the war if not dragging it out longer. His take on the outcome was that the level of uncertainty which likely dogged Jellicoe at that point is kind of hard to really relate to from a modern perspective. They'd lost a ton (actually thousands upon thousands of tons) of ships already and weren't entirely sure what the deal with their bloody ships was, none of the modern radio-based sensing equipment we've taken for granted for 60 years was present in 1916, and Jellicoe knew he had a strategic victory in hand even without destroying the German fleet because it meant the blockade would hold. So he decided not to pursue the Germans into the night. But, he added, Horatio Nelson probably would have! 
FAUXTON fucked around with this message at 15:22 on May 27, 2016 |
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May 27, 2016 14:32
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I just want to say that immediately pre-WWII the French had the best tanks in the world. It should be a rule here that if you say "...was the best tank" then you have to specify what factors made it the best in your mind. For example, what makes LT-35 better than everything else? One man turret where commander was responsible for everything (Germans added a loader)? LT-38 had a two man turret, Germans crammed an extra seat there as well. LT-38 never got into service with Czechoslovakian army, anyway, so calling it a pre-war tank is debatable. It was still superior to Panzer II in some ways but Czechoslovakia didn't have anything in the form of medium tanks so fair comparisons to German mediums are hard to make. The early war successes of German Panzer Korps anyway are not attributable to hardware but organization and leadership. Then comes factors stemming from design like 5 man crews where the commander can concentrate on his job and most tanks having radios and intercoms so commanders don't have to use flag signals to command their troops. At last come the vehicles themselves, and indeed early in the war Germans had nothing that would equal a Matilda II or Somua S-35 one on one. But the Allies also had too few of the superior ones, and usually they couldn't get in time where they were needed. Conversely, you could say most of it came from Allies having no clue how to use tanks. Tekopo posted:Would that be true even during the Invasion of France? Didn't the germans have a relatively low number of Panzer IVs during the invasion? Well yes, but even if it wasn't so Panzer IV was an infantry support tank equipped with a short barreled 75/L24 gun which wasn't much better against armour than the 37mm gun on Panzer III. Panzer IV only became a potent threat to tanks in 1941 with the F2 version. Already around 1940 Germans started equipping Panzer III's with 50mm guns. But like said, most of French tanks were much less capable, like the two man Renault R35's. Nenonen fucked around with this message at 14:47 on May 27, 2016 |
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May 27, 2016 14:37
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Fangz posted:I think the question of 'could the Nazis have won WWII' is fundamentally a political question and not a military one. If the allies started to consider negotiated settlements when things got bad then yeah, they could have won. Without Soviet and US involvement, Britain may not have been able to win on its own...but US involvement was probably inevitable, and even without Barbarossa there was a fair chance Churchill and Stalin would eventually be able to see eye to eye on "gently caress the Nazis". When it's just Britain vs Germany, neither can conclude the war on their own, but the long-term prospects are far better for Britain than for Germany. OctaviusBeaver posted:Stalin didn't want to believe that the Germans were about to invade and mountains of intelligence weren't able to convince him otherwise. Maybe those reports were from people who knew what he wanted to hear. how many times have military leaders lost battles because they assumed "my opponent can't possibly be dumb enough to do that"
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May 27, 2016 14:52
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People are putting too much emphasis on three vs two man turrets. Yes they are superior for all the reasons people mentioned but that won't win campaigns on their own. Frankly equipment matters very little as long as over all it's within the saw generation of each other.
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May 27, 2016 15:14
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You'd have to do a ton of military handwaving to create a scenario where the Germans manage to drive to Moscow, take it, and hold it without it turning into some Stalingrad-esque fiasco. And even when you do that, you'd still have to do a ton of political handwaving to presume that the Soviets would surrender or pursue an armistice or something. That rules out the possibility of Germany "winning" WW2 at any point past June 22 1941. There's probably some point before that, but after the Fall of France, where you'd only have to do the political handwaving to have Germany and the UK sign a peace treaty or armistice (maybe with the military handwaving to produce a Battle of Britain that doesn't reinforce British national morale), but you can't have a Germany that doesn't invade Russia eventually and still have Hitler as its leader. And even if you managed to do all that, you'd still have a Russia lead by Stalin that probably has its own designs on Germany anyway (but don't mistake this to mean that I buy into the counter-factual BS about the invasion of Russia being a defensive move or whatever). That rules out the possibility of Germany "winning" WW2 at any point before June 22 1941, as well. So no, I don't think Germany could have won WW2.
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May 27, 2016 15:34
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I feel like as it stands the Nazi's military performance was based on rolling a sequence of 6s whilst dosed up on Triumph Of The Will and spinning the Inevitable Aryan Supremacy line like a motherfucker. All the way from the mid 1930s onward they're gambling way over their heads and having to escalate every time to bluff it out before reality has a chance to catch up and crush them. Even if they'd scored another unlikely miracle in the skies over Kent or at the gates of Moscow it just meant they'd then be faced with another "roll a 6 or get shitstomped" a few weeks or months later.
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May 27, 2016 16:10
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You're probably more right than your simplistic analogy would suggest. It's notoriously difficult to produce a historically-accurate strategic-level result of the 1941-42 campaign in wargaming because the Germans did a number of things right, and the Soviets did a lot of things wrong. But put even a marginally more competent human player behind the Soviets and the outcome of Barbarossa never gets as far as it did.
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May 27, 2016 16:30
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Helicon One posted:I feel like as it stands the Nazi's military performance was based on rolling a sequence of 6s whilst dosed up on Triumph Of The Will and spinning the Inevitable Aryan Supremacy line like a motherfucker. All the way from the mid 1930s onward they're gambling way over their heads and having to escalate every time to bluff it out before reality has a chance to catch up and crush them. It's predicated on more or less a pretty substantial initiative bonus, with a healthy dose of hard sixes thrown on top of that. Once they bumped up against the Soviet Union and failed to knock them out of the war with Barbarossa, and the US decided to pick a side in Europe, their days were numbered as it became a war of attrition in the East, with one side being supplied by a wealthy and industrially mobilized country with a continent full of resources to exploit, well-separated from the ravages of war.
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May 27, 2016 18:19
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Helicon One posted:I feel like as it stands the Nazi's military performance was based on rolling a sequence of 6s whilst dosed up on Triumph Of The Will and spinning the Inevitable Aryan Supremacy line like a motherfucker. All the way from the mid 1930s onward they're gambling way over their heads and having to escalate every time to bluff it out before reality has a chance to catch up and crush them. There's something there. It's kind like while their enemies were busy building up character sheets and putting points into different skills without pushing any of them too hard, Germany just put all of its points into one or two skills so they were dominating the early-to-mid, but were not properly statted out for the first big raid dungeon. Please discuss which countries resemble which WoW dungeon.
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May 27, 2016 18:50
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I just want to say that immediately pre-WWII the French had the best tanks in the world.  Srsly, we need the stahlhelm version of that RIGHT NOW. Nenonen posted:It should be a rule here that if you say "...was the best tank" then you have to specify what factors made it the best in your mind.
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May 27, 2016 19:37
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Plan Z posted:There's something there. It's kind like while their enemies were busy building up character sheets and putting points into different skills without pushing any of them too hard, Germany just put all of its points into one or two skills so they were dominating the early-to-mid, but were not properly statted out for the first big raid dungeon. Germany failed to beat the UK before the enrage timer, so they had to deal with adds spawning in from the US.
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May 27, 2016 19:42
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If Germany was never going to win the war, at what point could they have ended it on their best terms? Maybe after defeating France they could have walked away with Alsace-Lorraine, some Balkan states, and half of Poland? France would be desperate enough to keep most of their country that they might convince England to go along with those terms.
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May 27, 2016 20:42
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Plan Z posted:Please discuss which countries resemble which WoW dungeon. USSR is Blackrock Depths, because it goes on forever Instead of the RPG analogy, the way Hitler felt to me was like the poker player who goes allin on every hand.
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May 27, 2016 20:55
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I can see France giving in, but England would probably stubbornly hold their ground. That was the whole problem with World War 1, it doesn't matter if the war is going nowhere, nobody really wants to give up if they haven't been totally stomped. And of course, Japan would still persist with doing it's own thing. Attacking America was their equivalent of Germany attacking Russia.
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May 27, 2016 20:56
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Krispy Kareem posted:If Germany was never going to win the war, at what point could they have ended it on their best terms? Maybe after defeating France they could have walked away with Alsace-Lorraine, some Balkan states, and half of Poland? France would be desperate enough to keep most of their country that they might convince England to go along with those terms. After annexing Bohemia and Moravia, ie. before there was a war. Or be satisfied with the Sudetenland and then a little later demand similar concessions from Poland and then perhaps, just perhaps, Britain and France would persuade Poles to acquiesce 'cause where's the harm. Germany was not going to realistically defeat Commonwealth militarily, nor was there going to be an easy way out after the war had started apart from actually allying with the Soviets for good. Why would Britain listen to someone representing a German-occupied France when that person/those people would be obvious collaborators? Or would Germany withdraw from France first, then let the French elect a new government and then have them broker a peace somehow..? Not that Germany would have withdrawn as long as the blockade continued, as robbing occupied territories was the prime way of feeding German people and U-boat pens on the Atlantic coast were the most effective way to pressure UK. Besides it was the invasion of Poland, not France that started the war, so why on earth would the British public be happy with a deal letting Germany keep Poland? No sane English politician would have even considered accepting it, it was even hard for Churchill and his bros to accept Soviets keeping what they had annexed in 1939 when Soviets were the only guys killing Krauts in continental Europe. Nenonen fucked around with this message at 21:16 on May 27, 2016 |
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May 27, 2016 21:10
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Nenonen posted:After annexing Bohemia and Moravia, ie. before there was a war. Or be satisfied with the Sudetenland and then a little later demand similar concessions from Poland and then perhaps, just perhaps, Britain and France would persuade Poles to acquiesce 'cause where's the harm. Uh, well, Vichy France was a thing. Give them back northern France and have them pay a whacking big indemnity a la 1870 and I could see them eventually being recognised by the UK as the legitimate French government, plus said indemnity helps the German economy with not going bankrupt.
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May 27, 2016 21:15
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feedmegin posted:Uh, well, Vichy France was a thing. Give them back northern France and have them pay a whacking big indemnity a la 1870 and I could see them eventually being recognised by the UK as the legitimate French government, plus said indemnity helps the German economy with not going bankrupt. And if they don't recognize them and continue the blockade and bombing German cities? How the hell does Vichy France pay that indemnity, do they send gendarmes to go all holodomor on French peasants? How does this unoccupied Vichy France defend itself against Free French forces (and their Anglo buddies) coming back? Is Germany just going to sit idly waiting for UK to have a change of mood when Britain is under no pressure to do so?
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May 27, 2016 21:25
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Cyrano4747 posted:I mean, gently caress, I'm pretty sure the Netherlands could have won a war with Germany in 1947. someone write this up as an alternate history scenario where the Netherlands invade Germany while the rest of the Allies and the USSR are just sitting there all 
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May 27, 2016 22:18
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atomicthumbs posted:someone write this up as an alternate history scenario where the Netherlands invade Germany while the rest of the Allies and the USSR are just sitting there all I will never pass up the slightest opportunity to post this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xo8DlBkSW_w
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May 27, 2016 22:29
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Cyrano4747 posted:People are putting too much emphasis on three vs two man turrets. Yes they are superior for all the reasons people mentioned but that won't win campaigns on their own. Frankly equipment matters very little as long as over all it's within the saw generation of each other. Cyrano4747 posted:Frankly equipment matters very little 
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May 27, 2016 22:32
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Nenonen posted:After annexing Bohemia and Moravia, ie. before there was a war. Or be satisfied with the Sudetenland and then a little later demand similar concessions from Poland and then perhaps, just perhaps, Britain and France would persuade Poles to acquiesce 'cause where's the harm. Well Germany was in Paris after the Franco-Prussian war and they negotiated a peace with land concessions. It wouldn't be that different in 1940. There's no alternate timeline where any of this would have happened. I was just trying to figure out where time traveling Hitler could have stopped to ensure the biggest win. It has to be after Poland, because Germany needed Alsace-Lorraine back. But it couldn't be after the Battle of Britain because England wouldn't have bent. England might object, but France would be like your best friend whose got a date with a super hot lady and he really needs you to double-date with her ugly friend.
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May 27, 2016 22:49
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Nenonen posted:Besides it was the invasion of Poland, not France that started the war, so why on earth would the British public be happy with a deal letting Germany keep Poland? No sane English politician would have even considered accepting it, it was even hard for Churchill and his bros to accept Soviets keeping what they had annexed in 1939 when Soviets were the only guys killing Krauts in continental Europe. I think you are overstating vastly how much of a poo poo the British public cared about Poland. The modern UK perspective makes a great play out of the nation being united and resolute and embodied by Churchillian stubbornness etc, but there's a heavy dose of myth making in there. There's a reason why Churchill lost power instantly after the war. War weariness is a real thing.
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May 27, 2016 23:28
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Krispy Kareem posted:Well Germany was in Paris after the Franco-Prussian war and they negotiated a peace with land concessions. It wouldn't be that different in 1940. quote:There's no alternate timeline where any of this would have happened. I was just trying to figure out where time traveling Hitler could have stopped to ensure the biggest win. It has to be after Poland, because Germany needed Alsace-Lorraine back. But it couldn't be after the Battle of Britain because England wouldn't have bent. But even a transsexual Jewish Hitler would know that this doesn't work. Why would Britain stop blockading Germany? If the blockade continues, how does Germany survive?
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May 27, 2016 23:29
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THe real issue is whether Japan DOW's the US or not. People are overestimating how much the US wanted to go to war with Germany even as late as June '41. FDR wanted to help Europe, sure, but huge, HUGE chunks of the population didn't want to be part of "Europe's war." If Germany doesn't invade Russia and Japan doesn't go to war with the US there is a path to a negotiated peace between the UK and Germany. That said, here we're deep into a threeway with gay black hitler, pansexual ladyboy stalin, and white foot fetish Tojo.
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May 27, 2016 23:42
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Cyrano4747 posted:
Go on...
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May 28, 2016 00:47
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LingcodKilla posted:Go on... You're going to have to go read the ringo thread if you want more of that, mister
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May 28, 2016 00:50
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You could pick one of the various attempts on Hitlers life to succeed if you're in a thought experiment type mood and need him out of the way. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Attentate_auf_Adolf_Hitler Elser especially got tantalizingly close to succeeding and with Hitler dead in November 1939 the rest of the war should get derailed quite a bit. Depending on when Hitler dies and who kills him the succession would look a lot different, early on the classically conservative elites and Wehrmacht maybe have a chance to wrest power from the NSdAP, with military conspirators getting time to prepare maybe a putsch succeeds, although the plans I've read about always sounded kinda rickety. In other situations you might end up with Göring or Himmler in full paranoia mode going on a serious purging spree, or even collapsing into infighting maybe.
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May 28, 2016 03:08
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Cyrano4747 posted:You're going to have to go read the ringo thread if you want more of that, mister I've always been partial to the idea that if there were alternate histories or timelines or whatever, the same general events happen the same way but the details are different. For example, say in the mirror universe version of Midway the American dive bombers miss Hiryu completely... but the Nautilus gets her instead, and the Mogami bites it rather than the Mikuma.
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May 28, 2016 04:37
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feedmegin posted:Not by World War 2. A battleship without radar is going to be outranged and outshot by a battleship that hasn't had all that stuff blown to bits, and by the nature of things you can't encase it in armour. Delivery McGee posted:The problem is that the rangefinders and antennae, for technical reasons, have to be outside the foot-and-a-half-thick armored box -- consider the radar in a metal box on your kitchen counter. It's a lot easier to sweep away the antennae and rangefinders so she can't see or hear or (accurately) shoot than to actually put a dent in the ship itself. I guess the main benefit of radar was to see the fall of shot and correct, wasn't it? Because they had some damned good optical rangefinders for plotting the enemy ship's course, but were probably too fiddly to get a range on splashes. Of course radar was a battle-winner in night engagements, as exemplified at Guadalcanal, when South Dakota had an electrician gently caress up leaving her deaf, dumb, and blind, then stumbled into knife-fighting range (5000 yards) with a bunch of Japanese heavy cruisers and a battleship, and was lit the gently caress up, literally (with searchlights) and metaphorically (with heavy guns), which only made her problems worse. Sister ship and wingman Washington had been tracking a couple of large targets on radar for some time, but held fire until they were in visual range because they were unsure which was South Dakota and which was IJN Kirishima. Friend and foe had similar-sized radar returns, and the American ships were from the era when the guns outpaced the armor, so not worth the risk. The Japanese task force didn't have radar, and what with the lights and explosions coming from their target, failed to notice the second American flanking them. At 8400 yards, basically point-blank for 16"/45 guns, Washington opened fire on the Japanese heavy, putting at least nine 16" AP shells and over 40 5" shells into her in the span of seven minutes.  The closest counterfire landed 200 yards away. A torpedo run by Japanese destroyers made Washington break off, leaving Kirishima with crippled steering gear and burning. Kirishima and one of her escorting destroyers sank during the night; the two American battleships met up in the morning and South Dakota limped into Brooklyn a month later for two months of repair work. aphid_licker posted:Depending on when Hitler dies and who kills him the succession would look a lot different, early on the classically conservative elites and Wehrmacht maybe have a chance to wrest power from the NSdAP, with military conspirators getting time to prepare maybe a putsch succeeds, although the plans I've read about always sounded kinda rickety. In other situations you might end up with Göring or Himmler in full paranoia mode going on a serious purging spree, or even collapsing into infighting maybe.
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May 28, 2016 05:46
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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Delivery McGee posted:Yeah, the conning tower. But as long as the rangefinders survived, the conning tower was all the superstructure a battleship really needed. The rest of the upper works is just funnels, admirals' staterooms, and the fairweather bridge. Cf. those photos of Seydlitz and others limping into port after Jutland. You really need to read up on what happened to Hiei at First Guadalcanal, or the damage done to South Dakota at Second Guadalcanal. In both cases a battleship was rendered completely combat ineffective by shell fire that had no realistic chance of penetrating its citadel. Admiral Lee described South Dakota's damage as sufficient to "render one of our new battleships deaf, dumb, blind, and impotent." 
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May 28, 2016 07:10
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What did King George VI do in the war, aside from visit the troops etc? Did he have a role in commanding the war effort or was that left up to Churchill and the war cabinet?
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May 28, 2016 09:25
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Jumpingmanjim posted:What did King George VI do in the war, aside from visit the troops etc? Did he have a role in commanding the war effort or was that left up to Churchill and the war cabinet? I believe it played a key part in sinking the Bismarck
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May 28, 2016 10:18
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gradenko_2000 posted:I believe it played a key part in sinking the Bismarck No that was King George V.
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May 28, 2016 10:21
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Well, now I'm curious - how many instances of heads of state taking direct command of a naval battle can the thread think of?
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May 28, 2016 11:00
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Tomn posted:Well, now I'm curious - how many instances of heads of state taking direct command of a naval battle can the thread think of? The Danish king Christian perhaps?
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May 28, 2016 11:07
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Cythereal posted:I've always been partial to the idea that if there were alternate histories or timelines or whatever, the same general events happen the same way but the details are different. For example, say in the mirror universe version of Midway the American dive bombers miss Hiryu completely... but the Nautilus gets her instead, and the Mogami bites it rather than the Mikuma. If there are an infinite number of universes, then there are an infinite number of incredibly boring universes where things only happen the slightest bit different. I like the one crazy alternate universe where, in the early morning of December 7th, Admiral Nagumo inadvertantly spills a small drop of tea on his arm, doesn't notice it, it doesn't affect his thoughts at all, no Butterfly Effect occurs, and everything else happens exactly the same way. In our reality, Nagumo drank that tea without any spillage whatsoever. I'm thinking of writing a 700 page alternate history novel about it.
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May 28, 2016 12:16
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Tomn posted:Well, now I'm curious - how many instances of heads of state taking direct command of a naval battle can the thread think of? Edward III at the Battle of Sluys. ~1340 AD Edward III at Battle of Winchelsea - ~1350 AD King Olaf of Norway at Battle of Svolder - ~1000 AD Theres probably a couple more where one of the English kings did stuff. Depends on your definition of "Head of State". If you start counting lesser heads of state, the Crusades have a couple more.
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May 28, 2016 14:15
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