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Basically the least lovely part of the poo poo sandwich, which is what you can say about so many decisions from like forever ago onward into infinity.
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Aug 23, 2016 14:35
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Cyrano4747 posted:
Yep, the strategy decided on made the most sense in the big picture, since Germany could much more plausibly win at some point. Which relates to the original thought I was idly pondering, that even enormous Midway style naval victories wouldn't have been sufficient to save Japan in the long run. Anyway, this dude wasn't even really arguing that the Allies should have done things differently, more just lamenting that the way it worked out China ended up being the one in the proverbial barrel. e: re CCP, he has a whole chapter that's just a very long list of every treacherous communication from US diplomats where they argue that the US should support the Communists. They range from the accurate "Mao is going to win anyway/ Communist China won't necessarily align with the USSR" to lol worthy "Mao isn't a 'real' communist and will enact democratic reform/ this will work out just *great* for the average Chinese citizen." P-Mack fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 14:36
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Frankly of you look at China from the fall of the Qing on its a loving miracle it turned out as well as it did. The CCP hosed up a lot, especially in Mao's crazier years, but I'm not sure a KMT dictatorship like what Chang & Co set up in Taiwan would have done much better.
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Aug 23, 2016 14:48
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 An old favourite, now in high definition courtesy of a blog.
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Aug 23, 2016 14:52
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HEY GAL posted:what is a division? what is a corps? is it like what i mean when i say "armada" (a very large armed force collected for a certain aim, whether on land or on the sea, english speakers only remember one of them because we don't have that word in our language) A division, at least in the Napoleonic era, is a permanent grouping of brigades and/or regiments with its own artillery support and dedicated staff. Usually it's about 7-10,000 troops for an infantry division, not sure about cavalry since they do their own thing. A corps is a collection of divisions with a complement of cavalry, artillery and engineers. The idea is that it can fight alone for 24 hours or until other corps could come to its aid. They're about 20-30,000 strong. A group of corps would typically form an army, usually responsible for a given geographic area (Army of Spain, Army of Bohemia, Army of Silesia, etc.), and is probably the same as an armada all things being equal.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:00
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HEY GAL posted:what is a division? what is a corps? This isn't really apropos of the current discussion so forgive me but this kind of cracked me up because the contemporary US military has absolutely no idea what these two things are or will be in the future. Basically a bunch of senior officers just asked the same question and got a resounding  as an answer
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Aug 23, 2016 15:04
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Cyrano4747 posted:Frankly of you look at China from the fall of the Qing on its a loving miracle it turned out as well as it did. The CCP hosed up a lot, especially in Mao's crazier years, but I'm not sure a KMT dictatorship like what Chang & Co set up in Taiwan would have done much better. In terms of political repression and corruption yeah it wouldn't really be any better, but I think the death toll would be lower. Chiang was really awful, but I don't see him being creative and bold enough to enact truly crazy poo poo on the level of deep ploughing, close cropping, and backyard furnaces. I totally believe he'd massacre tens or hundreds of thousands of dissidents, maybe mismanage a famine to the tune of or two or three million, but Mao's death toll is in 8 freaking digits and that would take a real concerted effort to match. e: remind me not to complain about having to choose the lesser of two evils come election time. P-Mack fucked around with this message at 15:10 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 15:06
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P-Mack posted:In terms of political repression and corruption yeah it wouldn't really be any better, but I think the death toll would be lower. Chiang was really awful, but I don't see him being creative and bold enough to enact truly crazy poo poo on the level of deep ploughing, close cropping, and backyard furnaces. I totally believe he'd massacre tens or hundreds of thousands of dissidents, maybe mismanage a famine to the tune of or two or three million, but Mao's death toll is in 8 freaking digits and that would take a real concerted effort to match. Crazy Autocrat in control of the entirety of China, might have played out tragically similar... but that's gay black hitler territory. How many people did the white terror in Taiwan kill? Can't be that many, right? I mean in "useless theoretical comparison that doesn't hold up to any scrutiny but is interesting" terms where you'd take the white terror death count compared to the average population of Taiwan between 47 and whenever it was in the 80s that it ended and then apply that proportion to all of China to see how many political dissidents per capita were removed of their capita in comparison between the two.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:15
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Siivola posted:
I think my favorite is No. 4 where they both just start bashing each other with their helmets.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:20
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I like No 9 because that is a timeless classic.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:20
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lenoon posted:Crazy Autocrat in control of the entirety of China, might have played out tragically similar... but that's gay black hitler territory. Wikipedia's only giving 4000 executions, so if we multiply that by 50 we're only at 200,000. That's with a population that would have already been self selected for a low commie ratio, though. Dunno if Chiang would have been more paranoid or less if he'd had the whole mainland, so yeah it's firmly in the realm of interesting but useless theoretical comparison.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:24
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bewbies posted:This isn't really apropos of the current discussion so forgive me but this kind of cracked me up because the contemporary US military has absolutely no idea what these two things are or will be in the future. Basically a bunch of senior officers just asked the same question and got a resounding If it's any consolation, the Russian army has been in pretty much the same boat since 2008/9 or so.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:25
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HEY GAL posted:what is a division? what is a corps? is it like what i mean when i say "armada" (a very large armed force collected for a certain aim, whether on land or on the sea, english speakers only remember one of them because we don't have that word in our language) Task Force.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:52
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SeanBeansShako posted:I like No 9 because that is a timeless classic.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:52
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david_a posted:What's he doing, looting the corpse? Looting is such an ugly word. He's just upgrading his baggage. With the contents of that mans coat. That he will wear and sell for drink/prostitures.
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Aug 23, 2016 15:54
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Flanker Pylon posted:If it's any consolation, the Russian army has been in pretty much the same boat since 2008/9 or so. I thought the Russians had Naval Infantry for that
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Aug 23, 2016 15:59
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Task Force. but we don't say "armada" so when we think armada we think the armada, even though it just means "armed [noun]" in spanish armadillo is, of course, the diminutive of that
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Aug 23, 2016 16:21
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david_a posted:What's he doing, looting the corpse?
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Aug 23, 2016 16:23
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I think brigades (brigada) in your era were more integrated combined arms formations that were assembled ad-hoc.
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Aug 23, 2016 16:27
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I don't want to make this a huge digression, but I'd kinda like to register my skepticism over the (population growth rate based) methodology behind estimates of death tolls during stuff like the Great Leap Forward, and also the basic idea of comparing death tolls from direct repression on an island regime with foreign support, and from massive famine due to gross incompetence during a period of technological and diplomatic (self-)isolation. There's not really any good examples of rapid industrialisation of a large rural country without massive bloodshed, and you can compare China with say India where in the latter you do avoid massive catastrophes - but the decline in mortality is a lot slower. Between 1950 and 1970 the death rate in China basically dropped by 2/3s while in India it only dropped by 1/3. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1e/Birth_rate_in_China.svg/300px-Birth_rate_in_China.svg.png vs http://www.geocases2.co.uk/images/populationindia/populationindia_figure_3.jpg You can see that the GLF stands out as a big peak in the Chinese graph mainly because of the much lower numbers before and after it - but that at its peak it was *equal* to India's average throughout the 1950s. If Chang Kai-Shek remained in control of China and decided to delay reform, we might not see single disasters like the GLF... but China could be racking up death tolls roughly on the scale of the GLF every year without anyone noticing. Fangz fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 16:33
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edit: oops, i mistranslated from 17th century spanish into modern spanish
HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 16:37 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 16:35
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HEY GAL posted:edit: oops, i mistranslated from 17th century spanish into modern spanish HeyGal.txt
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Aug 23, 2016 16:41
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Fangz posted:Sensible stuff I think you're right - it was more an off the top of my head ridiculous comparison than any attempt to make a serious point of discussion.
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Aug 23, 2016 16:49
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Fangz posted:I don't want to make this a huge digression, but I'd kinda like to register my skepticism over the (population growth rate based) methodology behind estimates of death tolls during stuff like the Great Leap Forward, and also the basic idea of comparing death tolls from direct repression on an island regime with foreign support, and from massive famine due to gross incompetence during a period of technological and diplomatic (self-)isolation. I'd disagree that killing millions (be they 10 or 30) through absurd avoidable mistakes helped the cause of industrialization and development- production declined in the aftermath of the GLF. But I'm fine with dropping D&D lite and getting back to tank chat.
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Aug 23, 2016 17:11
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P-Mack posted:We know the comparison to Taiwan is useless which is why we called it as such. But I don't know that direct comparison to India is particularly enlightening either. To clarify, I'm not saying it helped the cause of industrialisation to have giant disasters, I am saying though that if you embark on a gigantic program of industrialisation with few experts on hand then mistakes are going to be made. The only real way to avoid those catastrophes would be to bring in foreign advice and assistance, but for obvious reasons nobody in that time particularly wanted to assist China rising to a position where it could challenge their strength. I don't think that would have been different under Chang, and Chang would have the additional problem of having to fight against rural communist sympathies every step of the way. Comparing to India isn't great, but it's hard to think of any closer comparison. EDIT: Also, I think the US was pretty naive about the prospect of democracy in all sorts of countries in this period. All sorts of dictators were supported on the basis of 'I'm sure they are serious about long term democratic reform, just a matter of time'. Taiwan didn't have democracy until the 80s, well after Mao's death. Fangz fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 17:28
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HEY GAL posted:i might be completely wrong, but i thought brigade was just what the swedes called regiments The Swedish brigade was around 2000 men on paper, and a regiment was a different thing, being regional-based if a national unit. Except when it wasn't. I really should buy the Swedish General Staff's history of the wars of Gustav Adolf because I could actually look up in it what sub-units the Blue Brigade and the Yellow Brigade had.
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Aug 23, 2016 17:31
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HEY GAL posted:hmmm, good point In a modern spanish-language military context armada means navy.
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Aug 23, 2016 17:46
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P-Mack posted:e: re CCP, he has a whole chapter that's just a very long list of every treacherous communication from US diplomats where they argue that the US should support the Communists. They range from the accurate "Mao is going to win anyway/ Communist China won't necessarily align with the USSR" to lol worthy "Mao isn't a 'real' communist and will enact democratic reform/ this will work out just *great* for the average Chinese citizen." The latter isn't entirely unreasonable, there was a US mission to Yannan and the CPC had tried really hard to woo the US mission over. If the US had taken a pragmatic approach to China much like the British did and didn't ignore the Chinese concerns regarding Korea I think China could have been opened up 20 years earlier. I think the Soviets were a big enough pain in the rear end between 1949 and the Korean War that even the slightest interest by the Americans to normalize relations would've been seriously considered with enough prodding by Zhou Enlai.
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Aug 23, 2016 17:54
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is it OK to Montecuccoli?quote:As a regimental "owner" Monetcuccoli probably profited from at least some of those sources of income that later came to be regarded as illicit. He had to invest his own money on occasion. In 1632 he had to pay his own ransom. Like the majority of his colleagues he was of noble origin. His rise to prominence was a family affair, and he tried to do as much for Galeotto as his relatives had done for him. He worried about his future while in captivity. He had military judicial difficulties. He fought or may have fought duels. He was a status-seeker. He appears to have enjoyed the exercise of power and to have looked for adventure. Yet in the last analysis he is somewhat atypical...Material factors did not concern Montecuccoli nearly as much as they did others. He was a bit spendthrift--after all this was a part of life at court--and his family complained about it. Unlike others...he did not show much business acumen....[He] seems to have spent all his money on books, good living, and aesthetically satisfying projects. 
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Aug 23, 2016 17:59
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Kemper Boyd posted:The Swedish brigade was around 2000 men on paper, and a regiment was a different thing, being regional-based if a national unit. Except when it wasn't.
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Aug 23, 2016 18:44
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bewbies posted:I finally got to see the future howitzer which the engineers are lovingly referring to as RJ. The ammo for that is going to be real expensive because surely without guided rounds you're gonna run into accuracy limitations based more around the intervening atmosphere rather than any limitation of the gun.
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Aug 23, 2016 18:58
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Fangz posted:To clarify, I'm not saying it helped the cause of industrialisation to have giant disasters, I am saying though that if you embark on a gigantic program of industrialisation with few experts on hand then mistakes are going to be made. It wasn't just a lack of experts though, it was literally that during the Great Leap Forward, for how to industrialize (and everything else), what Mao said went. Even if there weren't world beating industrial experts in China at the time, there were plenty of people there who knew what they were doing better than he did. I don't think we have much basis to say the ROC would have done much better for industrializing and modernizing than the PRC eventually did under Deng Xiaoping, but Mao was really a unique kind of awful.
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Aug 23, 2016 19:13
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Fangz posted:To clarify, I'm not saying it helped the cause of industrialisation to have giant disasters, I am saying though that if you embark on a gigantic program of industrialisation with few experts on hand then mistakes are going to be made. Okay, I get what you're saying. I do think that the mistakes made go beyond what could be explained by lack of advanced technical expertise, though. Plenty of people in China knew how to grow rice, yet they managed to gently caress that up worst of all. Basically I just don't think Chiang would have ever had the kind of top to bottom, nationwide total social control required to gently caress up on that scale, not that he was any less of a crap dude. Thanks to you and everyone else for all the reasonable and sensible discussion on topics that usually end in a train wreck elsewhere.
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Aug 23, 2016 19:18
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Those kinds of problems are endemic to any attempt to haul peasants into the industrial era in a generation. Stalin also starved a fuckload of people to death. The later Maoist crazy also needs to taken in the context of the power struggles that we're going on at the time. The closest analog to the cultural revolution would be stalins purges, only crowd sourced. These problems are symptoms of using a Leninist government to bootstrap a continent spanning nation into world power status. Even if Chang avoids the sort of self inflicted wounds those movements produce he also probably doesn't unify the nation nearly as much or push the country towards an industrial footing in the same way. In short rather than what we see today you probably get something more akin to India's 20th C trajectory. Probably better for the people who starved to death or were killed as enemies of the revolution. Probably worse for the people working in factories or white collar jobs whose grandmothers were subsistence tenant rice farmers in the provinces.
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Aug 23, 2016 19:28
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Cyrano4747 posted:Those kinds of problems are endemic to any attempt to haul peasants into the industrial era in a generation. Stalin also starved a fuckload of people to death. The later Maoist crazy also needs to taken in the context of the power struggles that we're going on at the time. The closest analog to the cultural revolution would be stalins purges, only crowd sourced. Eh, I don't see why we need to look at China and Russia and conclude based on that dataset of two that mass death is a necessary component to unification and industrialization. Like the millions of dead landlords (and "landlords") could callously be viewed as the eggs of the new China omelet, but then there's also a huge number of deaths from purely useless agricultural stupidity that did nothing at all to increase production or benefit anyone. I can believe your prediction of the likely trajectory under Chiang vs the actual trajectory under Mao. But I prefer to interpret that as a consequence of two leaders being lovely in different ways, rather than as an unavoidable trade off between mass death and economic stagnation.
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Aug 23, 2016 19:57
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We definitely shouldn't accept the premise that rapid industrialisation and mass death go hand in hand - because they don't - but social dislocation is definitely inevitable. Plus, both China and the USSR industrialised without wide access to the world market and in the spirit of fear of imminent external invasion and internal revolt.
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Aug 23, 2016 20:09
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chitoryu12 posted:I think my favorite is No. 4 where they both just start bashing each other with their helmets. I like 3 where the guy on the right has pierced the left guy's hidden flask.
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Aug 23, 2016 20:56
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:In a modern spanish-language military context armada means navy. And in modern Russian language Armata means a family of armoured vehicles.
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Aug 23, 2016 20:58
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Nenonen posted:And in modern Russian language Armata means a family of armoured vehicles. I now believe Armata shares an etymology with whatever the Russian word for Armadillo is and you can't convince me otherwise. 
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Aug 23, 2016 21:02
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Kemper Boyd posted:The Swedish brigade was around 2000 men on paper, and a regiment was a different thing, being regional-based if a national unit. Except when it wasn't. A regiment was an adminstrative thing and a brigade was the actual combat formation of 2 or 3 regiments, can't remember which. Regiments would not form by themselves in battles, they would always be a part of a brigade.
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Aug 23, 2016 22:18
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