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my dad posted:That's a rather interesting read. I look into a fair bit of the operational level stuff and this write up seems to be on the mark for me. Time and time again you see units that are 100's of tanks strong that should do better on paper just evaporate, but then you see a another unit with barely a handful of tanks score solid victories because of much better leadership. I've plugged it here before, but Robert Forczyk's "Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front 1941-1942: Schwerpunkt" is an excellent overview of this topic at the start of the GPW. Xerxes17 fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Jul 6, 2016 |
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Jul 6, 2016 21:00
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After three solid recs inside a couple of hours I'd like to point out that Schwerpunkt is $2.42 on Kindle atm.
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Jul 6, 2016 21:04
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EX250 Type R posted:The United States Army is arguably the highest trained and most lethal fighting force known to humanity and look at the win/loss record there. Only because they never had to go against the Imperial cav led by Pappenheim.
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Jul 6, 2016 21:45
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Kemper Boyd posted:Only because they never had to go against the Imperial cav led by Pappenheim. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Jul 6, 2016 |
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Jul 6, 2016 21:51
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EX250 Type R posted:it isn't different at all imo and i didnt claim it was unique So basically you are saying ISIS is badass
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Jul 6, 2016 22:19
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gohuskies posted:Jason Cawley on the Battlefront forums has a good series of posts on how failings by staff and by combat supply and services really did in the Soviet armored efforts in 1941. It's a lot of text but I think it makes a strong case. It wasn't the power of the 88s or tactical issues - it was a fundamental disconnect with the difficulty of using armor in WW2 warfare and the operational ability to execute. Really interesting post! What are CF, C3, CSS and NTC?
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Jul 6, 2016 22:38
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Kemper Boyd posted:Only because they never had to go against the Imperial cav led by Pappenheim. I was going to say "yeah but most of their lethality is against civilians, weddings, funerals, schools, hospitals" but then I remembered about the 30yw and though.... drat. War is bad.
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Jul 6, 2016 22:43
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Hogge Wild posted:Really interesting post! At least some instances of CF are clusterfuck.
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Jul 6, 2016 22:46
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aphid_licker posted:Luftwaffle night fighters are my favorite WW2 planes. They look like clumsy dragonflies. If you like this sorta stuff, awhile ago I did a big infodump post on the He 219 for the Aeronautical Insanity thread
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Jul 6, 2016 22:47
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lenoon posted:I was going to say "yeah but most of their lethality is against civilians, weddings, funerals, schools, hospitals" but then I remembered about the 30yw and though.... drat. War is bad. Well, you could at least argue that in the pre-modern world, there was at least a point to it since that was how you made bank. And then got murdered by your comrades because you gambled all their loot away before sharing it.
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Jul 6, 2016 22:48
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Huge update pending. Once again, people insist on giving me money for services rendered. It's damned ungentlemanly is what it is. 100 Years Ago July 2: The morning after the day before. General Haig tries to work out what to do next. No, "stop" is not an option. Especially not when the French are breaking the Second Line and threatening Peronne, although it's awkwardly-sited on a bend in the River Somme. And also not when General von Falkenhayn's reaction to all this is about as wrong-headed as it could be. Accordingly a German reserve division counter-attacks at Montauban, and most of them get cut down like the BEF did at Thiepval yesterday. A BEF brigadier deploys some cunning sign warfare; an American university student has arrived to do the most ridiculous summer job possible; Robert Pelissier hears rumours of battles to come; Clifford Wells is learning to ride; and Maximilian Mugge tells his new mates about George Bernard Shaw and "Not bloody likely". July 3: A rarity in German East Africa; an 800-man Schutztruppe unit has been cornered and captured by the Force Publique and has not managed to slip the net at the last moment. General Joffre comes to see Haig and loses his temper in dramatic fashion; the French in general are slagging the BEF off, and well they might when they're breaking the German Second Line in record time; bloody diversionary attacks are launched against Ovillers and Thiepval; JRR Tolkien arrives a few miles to the rear of the Somme; Herbert Sulzbach is having to do some work for a change; Oskar Teichman has time for quiet reflection; and Evelyn Southwell is worrying about Malcolm White. July 4: It's raining, it's pouring, the old man is snoring. General Rawlinson is disinclined to act on reports that Trones Wood is empty unless he can have French support for the attack as an insurance policy; the Germans are organising more suicidal counter-attacks; La Boisselle is now behind the BEF front line, but there are still several German holdouts hiding in the village; British soldiers are very impressed by German trenches; the Ottoman Third Army begins retreating towards Bayburt; Romania re-opens negotiations to enter the war on the Entente's side; Admiral Scheer is convinced he can't beat the Grand Fleet in a straight fight and unrestricted submarine warfare is now Germany's only hope; British artillery intervention ends the Battle of Mecca; JRR Tolkien immediately gets stuck with supervising burial parties; Lt Alan Bott of the RFC has had his departure date for France delayed a month now; Edward Mousley has survived the desert marches out of Mesopotamia; E.S. Thompson gets more bullshit about being home soon; and Louis Barthas has a new squad and a new colonel. Guess who he likes more?
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Jul 6, 2016 22:49
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C3 is command, control, and communication; CSS are combat support services. NTC is probably the National Training Center in the US? It's where they've been doing operational maneuver training for a couple of decades now. Haven't gotten far enought into that thread to see the abbreviation pop up though.
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Jul 6, 2016 23:03
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Cyrano4747 posted:How is this any different from a crusader, mujahideen, or some Kipling or SS die hard just oozing nationalistic fervor? Yeah, it occurred to me later on that I was scoffing at the idea of being unafraid of death due to religious beliefs as an unrealistic fantasy as though suicide bombers don't literally exist today Still, it seems like an exaggeration, if attempted to apply to their entire culture. I'm just gonna chalk it up to "needed a soundbite for a video"
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Jul 6, 2016 23:14
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aphid_licker posted:Luftwaffle night fighters are my favorite WW2 planes. They look like clumsy dragonflies. Same. How effective were those radars?
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Jul 6, 2016 23:38
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Hogge Wild posted:Same. I'm not sure how they'd stack up to Allied technology, but the SN-2 all those He 219s have in those photographs had a range of about 10 km. The SN-2 was resistant to Allied jamming, but would be compromised as the war went on.
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Jul 6, 2016 23:43
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Ainsley McTree posted:Yeah, it occurred to me later on that I was scoffing at the idea of being unafraid of death due to religious beliefs as an unrealistic fantasy as though suicide bombers don't literally exist today Well, the only way to get to Valhalla is to hitch a ride with the Valkyries. To attract the attention of the Choosers of the Slain requires some serious badassery, including actually fighting to your own death. All the normal people or otherwise cool dudes who die from any other reason go to poo poo afterlives in Nifelheim and have their fingernails torn out to make a big ship that features in Ragnarök, or something like that. Most of that is probably inaccurate to some degree, but I'm pretty sure the Viking beliefs differed from later religions in that getting to the "good" heaven required heroism and death in battle. Not a religion for pacifists.
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Jul 6, 2016 23:45
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Nebakenezzer posted:If you like this sorta stuff, awhile ago I did a big infodump post on the He 219 for the Aeronautical Insanity thread That is a great post. I love the He 119 picture.
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Jul 6, 2016 23:46
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Hogge Wild posted:Same. "effective enough" Think less locking onto a target in space to tell you exactly where it is relative to you, more "there's a bunch of poo poo at this heading this many degrees above/below horizon." A useful tool in conjunction with ground radar for getting airplanes close enough to visually engage at night time when you can't just see the formation a few dozen miles away.
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Jul 6, 2016 23:46
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Decorus posted:Most of that is probably inaccurate to some degree, but I'm pretty sure the Viking beliefs differed from later religions in that getting to the "good" heaven required heroism and death in battle. Not a religion for pacifists. Well to be fair even religion for pacifists would sometimes do the same thing, like the Pope promising Crusaders **guaranteed access** to heaven if they died on Crusade.
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Jul 7, 2016 00:38
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Ainsley McTree posted:I just watched a video where an expert claimed that Vikings were such fearsome warriors because they didn't fear death, on account of how they believed they were going to Valhalla. Nonsense. Even people who aren't afraid of death (almost always) strongly prefer to be alive, given the option. Vikings were fearsome warriors because they invented boats that had an unprecedented combination of shallow draft and endurance. Longships could land on beaches, sail up rivers and streams, and traverse distances over ocean like no other ships of their day, making Vikings more mobile than anyone else. Consequently, Vikings could fight at the time and place of their choosing, appearing suddenly to raid or defeat isolated groups of their enemies and departing before a response could be organized. Surprise and strategic mobility, rather than sheer battlefield might, made the Vikings infamous. This is not to say that they were bad at fighting, because they weren't; they were experienced and frequently well-equipped from raiding. But equally, a big part of the success of the Viking shield wall was predicated on, for example, never meeting Carolingian heavy cavalry on open ground.
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Jul 7, 2016 01:19
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Asymmetrical warfare, in to-day's terminology!
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Jul 7, 2016 01:24
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Isn't not fearing death a major liability? The same way that people who can't feel pain end up with a load of accidental lacerations, if you've got people who aren't afraid of death, they'll go off and get killed in some stupid way. Didn't Japan's practice of kamikaze attacks end up wasting the lives of valuable skilled pilots who they couldn't really afford to replace? Not to mention the planes.
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Jul 7, 2016 02:18
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There wasn't really a lot of incentive for your average Viking to die on a beach in Normandy. The point was to get money, not conquer territory (some exceptions of course) because once the money stops flowing guys just kind of run off to go viking somewhere else.
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Jul 7, 2016 02:18
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First the bunker hill guy lies to me about British bayonets, now this. Seems like you just can't trust people in costumes to tell you about history
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Jul 7, 2016 03:00
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SlothfulCobra posted:Isn't not fearing death a major liability? The same way that people who can't feel pain end up with a load of accidental lacerations, if you've got people who aren't afraid of death, they'll go off and get killed in some stupid way. It certainly can be. And indeed you find debates about what appropriate behaviour for warriors in in Japanese where foolishly throwing away your life is reprimanded; and while Spartans were expected to fight to the death, recklessly throwing away your life outside of formation to kill the enemy was not appreciated.
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Jul 7, 2016 03:12
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The White Wolf's War If you've been reading my shamefully stalled Taiping posts, you'll have noticed that by the late 19th century the Qing government had gotten really, really lovely and disliked by a great many Chinese. Nevertheless, it had proven remarkably resilient, surviving through its strong connection to the gentry class and by sheer weight of inertia. It had weathered the Taiping, gotten stomped by Britain, and failed to effectively reform. It got stomped by Japan, and failed to effectively reform. It coopted the boxers, got stomped by everyone, then failed to effectively reform. By 1911, the dam finally burst, and revolutionary uprisings across China swept the ancien regime away. You've heard of Sun Yatsen (孫逸仙), no doubt, the principled reformer honored by the PRC and ROC alike as the father of modern China. You may also have noticed that Chinese history from 1911 to now is basically as much of a clusterfuck of chaos and death as the rest of Chinese history. For that, you can thank Yuan Shikai (袁世凱).  Sun, you see, had the hearts of the Chinese people behind him. Yuan, on the other hand, had the Beiyang (北洋) army. The most modern force in China, it was, like the yongying forces of the Taiping era, loyal to its commander foremost. Yuan had picked the right side during the Boxer Rebellion, then during 1911 was given supreme command of the Qing armies, before picking just the right time to negotiate with the revolutionaries . Yuan negotiated the imperial abdication, and ensured that the price of his essential cooperation was the presidency of the new Chinese Republic. Further hardball politics forced Sun to place the capital in Beijing, Yuan's center of power, as opposed to Nanjing, firmly in the hands of republican revolutionaries. The end result is that Chinese Democracy is delayed indefinitely. From the start, military power and political power are inseparable, to be cemented when the elected premier Song Jiaoren eats a not particularly mysterious bullet before he can make any move to curtail Yuan's power. The intensely local power dynamics of the Taiping era have hardly changed with modernization. The mountains remain high, and the These principles of military organization by personal loyalty as set up by Zeng Guofan would now set China on a path to disaster. Instead of a professional army organized and equipped on a nationwide basis, the only effective military forces were raised, equipped, and controlled locally by regional leaders. Imperial control in the Taiping era had relied on men like Zeng Guofan, who had no practical restraints on their armies, to be committed to the idea of the empire. Western observers during the Taiping era had been baffled by the reluctance of great men like Zeng, Zuo Zongtang, and Li Hongzhang to seize the government for themselves, not realizing how internally constrained they were by their committment to the Confucian ethical system. During the Boxer rebellion, the fractures in the system became clear, as each general decided for themselves which side to lend their support to, with the winners naturally being declared the real loyalists once the dust settled. Now, with the bonds of empire dissolved, the weak centrifugal force that had kept the generals in check was almost gone entirely. Perhaps, if things had gone differently, the democratic republic could have seized this moment, created a new consensus, a national idea to keep the regional leaders pointed vaguely in the same direction, balancing power politically instead of militarily. But with Yuan jumping to the top of the "gently caress you, got mine" ladder, the tone is set, and only brute force and patronage will keep the provinces in line. _____________________________ The chaotic free for all is not confined to the top echelons of power. Throughout rural China, things have scarcely changed since the days of the Nian Rebellion. Local communities are still often on the cusp of starvation, and it's not uncommon for men with no farmwork available to turn to banditry during the slack season. Village A preys upon village B, village B raises militia in defense, militia becomes bandits themselves when food is scarce and the chance to raid village C turns up. This low level violence would be exacerbated into major crises by China's frequent natural disasters, as well as the artificial pressure on rural regions created by the country's trade routes realigning along rails instead of waterways. With little opportunity for honest living, it was not unusual for dirty deeds to be done dirt cheap. Military response to bandit problems likewise was little changed since the Nian days. Actually fighting bandits was expensive and dangerous. Negotiating a live and let live arrangement where they hosed off to the next county over and poo poo in someone else's bed for a while was comparatively cheap. If a display of force was needed, the military would come in, garrison themselves in people's homes and requisition their food for a month, then declare the bandit problem solved (since all the bandits had been warned and left ahead of time). For many bandits meanwhile, the military represented not only a foe, but simultaneously an aspiration. It was not uncommon for bandits to be incorporated into the military as a simple way of resolving a bandit problem without fighting. The demand to be allowed into the military was a frequent demand of kidnappers and extortionists. In fact, eventual "pacification" and official rank was apparently the goal from the very start for some of the more ambitious leaders. Most bandit rank and file were part timers, local bullies who'd keep themselves fed with larceny when farmwork was unavailable. Ditch diggers in particular often found themselves out of work, yet conveniently were already organized in an itinerant band with other young men in the same circumstance. And then there were soldiers, either deserters or discharged men with weapons and little else to do until such time as they become soldiers again. And finally there were the career bandits, men who had through choice or accident become permanently estranged from polite society and would find themselves with no choice but to ride or die. It is to such a man we will turn to now. _____________________________ Bai Lang (白朗)was a thoroughly ordinary man from a thoroughly ordinary middle class farming family in Henan, a region known for poverty and banditry. His family were the only Bais in their village, and Bai Lang found himself surrounded by frequently hostile Wangs. One heated encounter with the Wangs left one Wang dead in an accidental fall. The Wangs had enough cash and influence to have Bai Lang thrown in jail for this, and it was not until a year later that his family was able to free him at the cost of much of their land. Bai Lang comes out of all this pretty pissed off. His early experiences as a persecuted underdog informed the mentality of his later life. If he at this point had said gently caress you to his Wang filled home, run off to the woods, and joined a bandit gang, he would be just another desperate and foolish bandit who lived fast and died young. Instead, convinced by his mother not to do anything rash, Bai instead abandons his Wang-infested home village. He does one better than becoming a bandit- he becomes a soldier. Bai Lang enlists in the Beiyang army of Yuan Shikai. He rapidly rises through the ranks of the sixth division and wins the trust of its commander Wu Luzhen (吴禄贞）, eventually joining Wu's staff. Wu has spent time in Japan receiving a modern education, and has been known to make strong comments in favor of a democratic constitutional monarchy as the path forward for China. Come 1911, with Yuan Shikai still commanding the loyalist forces and trying to stem the rebellion, Wu and Bai find themselves sent to Shanxi to put down the revolution there. What happens next is controversial, but potentially critical to Bai Lang's motivations. Wu, it seems, opened talks with the revolutionaries, possibly conspiring to join the revolution. Within a week, he is filled full of lead in a sudden assassination. The blame is put on disgruntled Manchu deserters, but rumors and modern historians point the finger at Yuan Shikai. With his commander and friend dead, Bai Lang feels no particular loyalty to the Beiyang army as an institution. He abandons the army and returns to his home. Home isn't doing too great, with banditry, poverty, and official harassment making life difficult for his poor mother. This time she doesn't bother to object when Bai joins some old friends who have turned bandit. He soon begins rounding up the local talent and starting his own gang. He quickly has a decent crew of a few dozen put together, no doubt leveraging the leadership and organizational talents from his military career. Bai Lang is much older, possibly wiser, and will aim considerably higher than the usual bandit. _____________________________ At the time, the kingfish of the local western Henan bandit organization was a man named Du Qibin. Du was a much more conventional bandit leader. He maintained connections with local big shots on the right side of the law, and was careful to avoid too much direct provocation to government officals or major landlords. Du was also willing to throw his men to the wolves when the heat got too intense. None of this sat well with Bai Lang. While Du flees the area ahead of a rumored government sweep, Bai instead robs the district magistrate himself, capturing a dozen guns and then ransoming the magistrate's son for even more. Guns were everything to a bandit gang. The days of spears and crude matchlocks were not gone, but those were the tools of the poor and desperate. With state of the art western firepower readily available, anyone who didn't want to to be left behind would need to either steal a modern bolt action rifle, or steal money and then buy one. There were never enough guns for everyone, as evidenced by reports of bandits using the old, "Ping, you go in front with your rifle; Pang, you pick up Ping's rifle if he dies." Shares of loot were distributed based on not just people but guns. So if Pang borrowed an extra rifle from Ping, he gets one share, while Ping gets three for himself and the two guns. Ammunition was scarce enough that bullets were known as "silver dollars", but bandits nevertheless made sure to conduct target practice and entertained themselves with shooting competitions. Reports from kidnapping victims note that they seemed to spend every spare moment caring for their weapons. Bai Lang's rise would soon accelerate. In 1912 Du Qibin and the other local bandit chiefs were offered official rank and title by the government. They eagerly accept, only to find out that the offer was a ruse and they are all quickly executed. Whether Bai Lang was more clever than the rest or more ideologically committed to a Robin Hoodesque ideal of rebellion is impossible to say, but by declining the offer he immediately became the preeminent bandit of western Henan, drawing the followers of his executed compatriots to himself. He sets up a base of more than 600 men in Muzhuxia, "Sow Gorge", a remote, easily defensible valley 20 miles from Baofeng. (The Nian had used it for the same purpose a half century earlier.) The gang grows in both wealth and power. Men disguised as beggers identify merchants or landlords with something worth stealing. Often, the target of theft was the victim themself. "Meat Tickets" as kidnap victims were known, were a lucrative business, and in some cases the bandits would simply notify the victim in advance to be ready with a certain sum by a certain date if they wished to forestall their abduction. Anyone of means would need to keep a fund at the ready for this purpose. Once the jacking has been completed, a system of intermediaries would allow the bandits to dispose of any loot and exchange valuables for food and weapons. It was not unheard of for the bandits to buy weapons from the government itself, via the usual crooked officers. Bai Lang went out of his way to recruit former soldiers and officers to his cause, perhaps making his gang a bit more effective in a straight up fight than the typical bandit gang. _____________________________ As the gang grew into the thousands, simple theft took on a character of peasant rebellion. The army developed the strength to raid and extort not just the roads and villages but walled towns and even cities. Bai Lang would develop a reputation as the scourge of the rich and friend to the poor, which is no doubt romanticized but seems to have a grain of truth. He also developed, through a fortuitous homophone mixup, a new name, 白狼, the white wolf. His men are mostly poor peasants, and Bai Lang did not cultivate shady arrangements with the local elite like Du Qibin and the more conventional bandits had. They focus their pillaging on the richer parts of town and leave the poor quarter unmolested, sometimes even bestowing largesse upon its residents. In one case, the city of Nanzhao, the city opened the gates and freely offered the bandits a large sum of money. Bai Lang had enough sense of chivalry that his army contented themselves with a single meal in the city and then departed without even taking the money. There was something more than merely money motivating the bandit leadership. The next phase of Bai Lang's activity would take on more of a political character, but the details of those politics are a matter of some debate. In 1912, not long after his movement had crossed threshhold from "large gang" to "small army", Bai Lang had apparently joined forces with Royalist parties devoted to Qing restoration. As incongrous as it may seem, with Yuan Shikai's republic as the new face of despotism there was a level of peasant sympathy with the monarchist cause. The queue, symbol of Manchu oppression, had somehow morphed into a symbol of rebellion on behalf of the ordinary Chinese people in the face of frightening and confusing change . Considering the economic disruption of western inspired reform had largely fallen on the shoulders of the peasantry, it's not so hard to imagine the appeal of a conservative platform based on returning to an idealized past. Bai Lang's army would often attack western owned institutions, though its hard to make a determination there between some ideological motivation or simply "that's where the money is." Bai Lang's personal attachment to the monarchist cause was likely minimal. The alliance did, though, represent an arrangement of convenience against a mutual enemy in Yuan Shikai. The other political force soon to be supporting Bai Lang would be the Second Revolution, the attempt by Sun Yat Sen and the other southern revolutionaries of the Guomindang to reclaim the republic from the forces of Yuan Shikai. They would join their movement to Bai Lang for the same reason the monarchists did- Bai Lang had guns and hated Yuan Shikai. A crackdown on radicals in early 1913 drove many would be revolutionaries to seek safety with Bai Lang. This swelled his numbers and provided useful support and intelligence links outside of Henan, but it would also introduce a tension that would prove problematic for the future of Bai Lang's army. Simply put, revolution demanded that Bai Lang strike out from Henan to inspire the people and carve out a larger base to oppose Yuan. His bandit subordinates, however, were much more concerned with their own home areas of Henan, and were much more interested in protecting these regions and eventually returning there, (after becoming rich with booty, of course.) In the spring of 1913, the impetus to move out eventually wins, though not without internal dissension, desertion, and one subchief being shot for disobeying Bai's command. Their first move is towards Anhui, likely to try to link up with the revolutionaries of Huang Xing (黃興)in Nanjing, who has promised that Bai Lang will be governor of Henan after the revolution succeeds. Unbeknownst to Bai, however, these forces have already been dispersed and fled by the time his army moves out. Nevertheless, the towns of Luoshan and Guangzhou are sacked and the bandit army marches and loots its way as far as Luan in Anhui. Yuan Shikai sends a hundred thousand man army to pursue Bai Lang back into Henan, supported with western artillery and even aeroplanes loaned by the French. Bai Lang, you see, had ransacked Western businesses such as the British American Tobacco Company and kidnapped missionaries for ransom, generating lurid headlines and first person accounts in the foreign press, and diplomatic problems for the Beijing government. Not wishing to see more direct foreign intervention, Yuan Shikai's government forces are under tremendous pressure to get results, and bring China's Pancho Villa to ground. The pursuit is complicated by uncooperative peasantry, who aid the bandits and provide misleading information to government forces, all very reminiscent of problems experienced during the Nian rebellion fifty years earlier. Bai, having received little of the promised support from the revolutionaries in Anhui, evades Yuan's forces and turns west through Hubei towards Sichuan, a classic grand strategy used before by Shi Dakai, the White Lotus, and Zhuge Liang. More practically from the revolution's perspective, a Bai Lang controlled Sichuan would draw Yuan's attention away from the more critical Yangtze valley. As the army passes through northern Hubei, its numbers swell with local bandits who hop on the opportunity to join a winning team. Their outlooks are largely parochial however, and the army could melt as fast as it grows, should circumstances turn. The army, with over ten thousand men, plenty of rifles, and even machine guns, moved through Hubei and Henan, but finding the passes to Sichuan contested, made a fateful decision to divert into Shaanxi and Gansu and enter Sichuan through the north. This is not without controversary, as there remained a major contingent wishing to stay in Henan and fight a defensive war on home soil. But Bai Lang is not interested in returning to simple banditry. In a conference in March of 1914, he convinces the majority of his subchiefs to join him and advance into Shaanxi. A formal proclamation is made and distributed as the army passes through Shaanxi, declaring the Great Commander of the Army for Support of Han's goals in fighting the despotic forces of Yuan Shikai, who had so quickly moved in to despoil the Han people so shortly after their liberation from the Manchu, and whose mismanagement would leave China weak and exploited by foreign powers.  _____________________________ Things go well enough in Shaanxi, but the northwest is Hui territory. The Muslims of Gansu have a fierce reputation dating back to the Yuan dynasty. This was reinforced by the vicious rebellions in the 1870's and 1890's, as well as their providing some of the most effective anti-western forces of the Boxer Rebellion. The days of rebellion have ended, and the various leaders of Gansu have sought to preserve their position through accomodation, first with the Qing, and then with Yuan's republic. It is safer to pledge allegience to a far off ruler than to potentially leave themselves again at the mercy of aggressive neighbors. There are a handful of competing local leaders representing different families and Islamic societies, all of whom are surnamed Ma for maximum confusion. Prominent among them is the thoroughly conservative Ma Anliang (馬安良), politically aligned with the Manchu governors of Gansu. Bai Lang's initial move into Gansu goes smoothly. Tongwei county gave his men food and shelter, and in return Bai Lang left in peace, after donating a large sum to the local elementary school to purchase new books. Thereafter, though, things began to sour. Bai Lang's men contain many members of the Elder Brother Society, a nationalist secret society whose conception of the nation includes only the Han, not the Manchu or Hui. The organization and, through familiy ties, its members can trace back to struggles against the Hui in the Dungan revolts, creating a reservoir of bad blood on both sides that will poison relations with the villages they pass. The bandit army, which could count on support from the peasantry of Henan, finds itself in hostile territory, and wastes no time in exacerbating the situation by pillaging and abusing Hui villagers. If Bai Lang still held Robin Hood ideals of noble banditry, he proved incapable of controlling his bandit army, which was now becoming very much a "horde" in both numbers and temperament. The army advances in the general direction of Lanzhou, but finds itself stopped in its tracks by Ma Anliang's Hui armies. Bai Lang diverts south, only to find progress towards Sichuan blocked by Tibetan militias and flooded rivers. The former he is able to drive off, but the latter is insurmountable. The army heads back north to the town Taozhou, which is more technically two towns, Old and New Taozhou. New Taozhou does not resist and is only lightly pillaged. Old Taozhou, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly Muslim and no quarter will be asked or given. The city is home to several Sufi Khafiya brotherhoods who are prepared to fight to the death for their mosques. Outside the city, a mountain fortress is home to the Xidaotang, another brotherhood controversial for both its theological innovations and republican politics. Bai Lang's men seize Old Taozhou, and leave the town of over 10,000 nothing but ashes when they are done. Rape, murder, and pillage is the order of the day. The Hui defenders make a last stand in one of the mosques, before it burns completely to the ground. Whether the fire was set by Bai Lang's men or as an act of mass suicide is impossible to say. This act of blood letting has done nothing to improve Bai Lang's strategic situation. The rivers are still impassable on one side, Ma Anliang's forces are still hemming him in on the other, and the path back will mean crossing already devastated ground, and ambushes by hostile peasants who have already been burned once by the bandit army and won't be caught off guard. With no better option presenting itself and Yuan's pursuit forces gradually closing in, to head back to Henan is the path Bai Lang chooses. Meanwhile in Gansu, Ma Anliang uses the fact that the Xidaotang are still alive to prove that they must have been collaborators or cowards, and has their leadership arrested and executed, conveniently removing a competitor for power in Gansu. The fact is that they defended their mountain fortress formidably enough that Bai Lang diverted around and left them alone, a defensive strategy not terribly unlike that being employed by Ma Anliang himself. But the contrast to the martyrs of Old Taozhou is a fatally bad look for them. _____________________________ Bai Lang's options are running out as he moves back through Shaanxi to Henan. Some of his officers want to link up with the Manchu restorationists, others with the southern revolutionaries. Some grandiosely suggest Bai Lang declare himself emperor, and become another Liu Bang (founder of the Han dynasty) or at the very least another Hong Xiuquan. And then there is the original gang from Henan, who suggest once again that they just return home. This time, Bai Lang listens to them. This time, it is a fatal mistake for him. When he reaches the old haunts of western Henan, his army, which had held up throughout the tough fighting in Gansu, rapidly disintegrates. He has been favoring his Henan troops, which hasn't gone unnoticed by the other bandits which have joined the army along the way. The Shaanxi men have mostly deserted already as he passed through their territories. Now that he is in Henan, men from Anhui and Hubei see little reason to stay. They joined up for an unprecedented opportunity at loot with an extraordinarily large army. With the momentum stalled, there is little reason to stay in Henan to live in someone else's bandit lairs and defend someone else's turf. That wasn't what they signed up for.  The Henan men, on the other hand, have gotten exactly what they signed up for- a chance to get rich off of loot and then return home alive to spend it. They are home now, and they would much rather return and get to spending for themselves than continue in the generally unpleasant army life, fighting for an increasingly abstract political cause instead of riches. Singly and in groups, they disappear. Bai Lang's ten thousand man army is soon no more than a few hundred by the time he gets back to his home near Baofeng. And there he finally runs out of luck. He and his remaining men attempt to hide out in a small secret valley. The secret,however, is not safe. An old farmer remembers their hiding spot from when he was a boy, when a band of Taiping rebels had hidden there. He leads the government troops up a nearly invisible goat path, and Bai Lang and his men meet the same fate as those Taiping had. Bai Lang himself is mortally wounded and crawls home to die in bed in the same place he was born. The authorities dig him up and put his head on display as proof that the White Wolf, the terrifying bandit who had made headlines around the world, the last military hope of the Second Revolution, is no more. _____________________________ The end of Bai Lang cemented the defeat of the Second Revolution and Yuan Shikai's supremacy over China. Yuan is effectively the new Cao Cao, but, as it turns out, he has not read Three Kingdoms all that closely. In 1915, he makes the enormous mistake of declaring himself emperor, rather than being content with being supreme ruler in all but name. This move is so loving tacky that he rapidly loses both foreign support and the loyalty of his provincial subordinates. He eventually backs off of the scheme after a few months and dies of illness not long after. But the short lived empire has already shattered the authority of the central government in Beijing. And so the warlord era begins. Bandits would bedevil China for another three decades, though most bandit leaders would defy government a little less openly, and the most successful would put on the uniform of a government themselves, be it Guomindang or CCP. The Japanese in Manchuria would rely heavily on organized crime connections in establishing control of occupied territory, so there was truly no part of China where the underworld did not play a significant role in the strife to come. Yet while banditry continued to bring misery on China, the legend of Bai Lang grew. His more sordid deeds such as Taozhou are glossed over or explained away, and the poor peasant remembers him as someone who, however imperfectly, was one of them, who fought for their cause. Bai Lang's motley bandit crew was hopelessly inadequate as a serious army of social revolution, his links to the nationalist revolution were weak and ineffective for both parties. But he took from the rich, gave to the poor, and told the Sheriff of Nuodinghan to eat a dick. Sometimes, that's all it takes to make a hero.
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Jul 7, 2016 04:08
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SlothfulCobra posted:Isn't not fearing death a major liability? The same way that people who can't feel pain end up with a load of accidental lacerations, if you've got people who aren't afraid of death, they'll go off and get killed in some stupid way. I don't think I would call your average kamikaze pilot skilled. Most of them were given really rudimentary pilot training. It was a dumb, wasteful tactic but it's not like they were filling them with the tattered remnants of their '40-42 vets.
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Jul 7, 2016 04:13
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Berserkers were a not uncommon feature of traditional Malay combat, in fact the term "amok" as in "to run amok" comes to English from Malay. Individuals running amok are described in many of the same terms as beserks, immune to pain, careless of injury, and fighting with preternatural strength. Curiously some accounts report whole units running amok together, though I'm not sure what this meant in practice. Occasionally Malay men fell into fell moods and ran amok without warning, attacking their friends or themselves in some kind of pre-modern spree killing. Charney, Michael W. Southeast Asian Warfare, 1300-1900 posted:The persistence with which an amok warrior could carry on the fight is found in one account of an encounter between a European armed with a lance and a Makassar:
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Jul 7, 2016 04:17
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Pretty much all the scenes with Yuan Shikai in Jackie Chan's 1911 were pretty much entertainingly good at capturing the dude playing sides.
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Jul 7, 2016 04:21
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Warlord Era! Always wanted to know more about it.
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Jul 7, 2016 04:28
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I'm fairly certain one of the pilots involved in the Battle Off Samar (Taffy 3 et al) fired his .45 out the window of his aircraft at the bridge of the Yamato and then threw his kneeboard at them when he ran out of bullets. Does that count?
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Jul 7, 2016 05:01
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Thanks so much for taking the time and effort to write this up. It's super interesting and well written.
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Jul 7, 2016 05:44
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HEY GAL posted:*owns self repeatedly a few yards from a Swede* *Is Gustavus Adolphus*
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Jul 7, 2016 05:59
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P-Mack posted:The end result is that Chinese Democracy is delayed indefinitely. You don't even know how wrong you are homeboy. Chinese democracy was released in 2008
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Jul 7, 2016 07:00
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Nebakenezzer posted:Well to be fair even religion for pacifists would sometimes do the same thing, like the Pope promising Crusaders **guaranteed access** to heaven if they died on Crusade. Yeah, that bit is/was hardly unique to Viking religious beliefs. The difference is that the Pope, as far as I know, never said that only crusaders ever get to go to heaven.
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Jul 7, 2016 07:38
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Thank you for all of your posts P-Mack, they're really wonderful reading. I was a bit confused that you'd see Qing monarchists among the general public wearing the queue as a sign of defiance, and even more so that the same army contains your standard Han nationalist secret societies, especially because I always thought of that phenomenon as at least nominally a Ming restoration thing. What am I missing here? Was Bai Lang's army so spread out that those factions just didn't have to deal with each other?
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Jul 7, 2016 09:08
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Koesj posted:After three solid recs inside a couple of hours I'd like to point out that Schwerpunkt is $2.42 on Kindle atm. 99p in  which surprises me considering recent events 
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Jul 7, 2016 09:54
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To be honest Valhalla doesn't sound like a lot of fun either. The main takeaway I'd take from norse religion is "live as long as you can, because it gets worse after."
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Jul 7, 2016 10:09
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The Lone Badger posted:To be honest Valhalla doesn't sound like a lot of fun either. The main takeaway I'd take from norse religion is "live as long as you can, because it gets worse after." Someone once said that the reason why Christianity had such an easy time in Scandinava (not really though) was due to the afterlife. So according to Christianity either you go to heaven which is all good, or else you go to Hell, which in comparison to the Norse Hel at least was hot and therefore an improvement both to Hel and real actual Scandinavian winters. Win-win one could say.
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Jul 7, 2016 10:22
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Polikarpov posted:I'm fairly certain one of the pilots involved in the Battle Off Samar (Taffy 3 et al) fired his .45 out the window of his aircraft at the bridge of the Yamato and then threw his kneeboard at them when he ran out of bullets. Does that count?
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Jul 7, 2016 10:32
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