|
Thanks for that post! I'd be interested in reading more.HEY GAL posted:wait, were you saying every general from the war is available or every general from ever? For your war, but then also why not all of them ever?
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 17:46
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 17:18 |
|
|
HEY GAL posted:wait, were you saying every general from the war is available or every general from ever? Inversely I really want to give Pappenheim a tank.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 17:58
|
|
|
HEY GAL posted:wallenstein on point and kepler isn't dead So that's why the war took so long. But why, in the later periods of the war was it possible to recover within a year from being beaten? Shouldn't all the mercenaries that weren't in your or the enemy's army have starved to death?
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 18:18
|
|
|
Monocled Falcon posted:So that's why the war took so long. But why, in the later periods of the war was it possible to recover within a year from being beaten? Shouldn't all the mercenaries that weren't in your or the enemy's army have starved to death? anyway, look up "war as process," it's what john lynn called 17th century war in his book on louis xiv. different from war in the 18th or 19th centuries, which is why milhistorians from the 18th and 19th centuries said it was dumb and bad and not like napoleon or clausewitz, therefore dumb and bad. characterized by taking land for short term goals (like feeding yourself or a diplomatic bargaining chip), lots of sieges, lots of murky situations and draws, no decisive battles, constant negotiations with the enemy, this weird state of permastasis, pausing every winter, contributions, etc
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 18:30
|
|
|
Hey Gal, question. I've been poking at some of the weirder edge cases in the Atlantic world w/r/t military. Mostly European powers using maroons/free blacks/slaves to . You've mentioned before that certain ethnicities were picked out as good light cav, for instance. Do you know much about how they would have been recruited/organized/integrated into the 'regular' armies?
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 18:56
|
|
|
Polyakov posted:I have been reading a great book on the Economics of WW1, and it gave birth to this post Thanks for a good post!
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 19:10
|
|
|
the JJ posted:Hey Gal, question. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroatische_Reiterei#Drei.C3.9Figj.C3.A4hriger_Krieg These guys were from the Military Border already, I think. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Frontier
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 19:17
|
|
|
Polyakov posted:
Good post! Applicable to WWII as well. Beyond political reasons for not employing women in the industrial labor force as quickly and to the extent the Allies did, plenty of German women (like my teenage grandmother) were busy farming turnips on small, very low tech farms. e: im going to plant some turnips tomorrow i hope they turn out ok
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 20:00
|
|
|
HEY GAL posted:for the last time, if i write timetravel fiction about the 30s, it will be on my own terms Are you familiar with the writings of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson? I could totally see him accompanying your regiment and fire guns out of the windows for fun. He once got evicted for that.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 20:06
|
|
|
Polyakov posted:This catastrophe for Germany greatly informed its policy after WW1, having lost the naval struggle with Britain it turned again to being a land power and its desire for Lebensraum in the East, they wanted the great grain producing plains of western Russia and Ukraine to give security in food, indeed in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk you can see that the CP occupied the large grain fields of Ukraine. A good post, thanks. I've a question: I've read that Nazi Germany actually did learn something from World War 1: that if wars were going to be fought successfully, then Germany was going to have to become self-sufficient in food. This proved a popular plank in the Nazi Platform for rural voters, who felt increasingly marginalized in industrial Germany - and the Nazis actually managed to achieve the self-sufficiency goal before World War 1 even started. As a result, even the worst times of food scarcity in WW2 [and after] in Germany where nowhere near as bad as it had been in World War 1. Is this true?
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 20:43
|
|
|
Man, one of the things just clicked with me after I'd watched the wargaming guy's video: He mentioned part of the idea the americans were operating on was that it was impossible to stop a blitzkrieg attack because concentrating enough antitank guns in one spot to beat them back was thought to be impossible. It just clicked that one of the things that must've changed as well was the availability of bazookas, panzerfausts, etc so you did, in fact, have a shitload of "antitank guns" in concentration at every point of your front.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 20:47
|
|
|
spectralent posted:Man, one of the things just clicked with me after I'd watched the wargaming guy's video: He mentioned part of the idea the americans were operating on was that it was impossible to stop a blitzkrieg attack because concentrating enough antitank guns in one spot to beat them back was thought to be impossible. It just clicked that one of the things that must've changed as well was the availability of bazookas, panzerfausts, etc so you did, in fact, have a shitload of "antitank guns" in concentration at every point of your front. I don't think that's really the case. For example, on the Eastern Front, while Panzerfausts did take a heavy toll on the T-34, I'm not aware of any real concerted attack beaten off by such weapons. What concerned the Soviets was less achieving the initial breakthrough but the possibility of counter attack. Meanwhile in defense, situations like Kursk illustrated that the 'blitzkrieg' could indeed be stopped - and without use of any rocket propelled anti-tank weaponry.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 21:43
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:A good post, thanks. WWII Germany was decidedly not self-sufficient in food stuffs. The entire point of the Generalplan Ost was that they would starve the Soviet civilians to death to produce food for the Reich.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 22:00
|
|
|
xthetenth posted:Inversely I really want to give Pappenheim a tank.  imagine him. wheeeeeee HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Aug 27, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 22:18
|
|
|
Fangz posted:I don't think that's really the case. Oh yeah, sure, but if your viewpoint is "tank attacks pretty much can't be stopped", and a factor in this is "we can't put enough guns everywhere", the introduction of a weapon which is in every squad, if not in multiples, that functions as an antitank asset, must also have been part of thinking leading up to "Why are we making specialist antitank brigades again?".
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 22:21
|
|
|
I'm not sure personal anti-tank weapons were quite effective enough in the second world war to invalidate specialist AT units. They were very short ranged for one thing, certainly better than nothing and more effective in dense terrain, but not able to replace the AT gun.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 22:24
|
|
|
xthetenth posted:Inversely I really want to give Pappenheim a tank. I seem to recall someone did one of those meme comics which had someone seeing Guns of the South and going away and writing a book about Sherman (the general) getting Shermans (the tanks).
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 22:25
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:A good post, thanks. They spotted the lessons of WW1 but they didnt really identify the correct solution. This is going to be a little fuzzy because im not great on Nazi ideaology so someone may need to correct me. The Nazi's got many votes from the rural set because they deliberately attempted to appeal to them, they were sort of the epitome of the classic German family that the Nazi's wanted to espouse, clean living and honest work and all that jazz. What they needed to do to become self sufficient was to mechanise and consolidate in order to raise efficiency, the german agriculture industry remained protected, in a large part, because it was such a large voting block that no politician wanted to mess with it, so you had small farms with one family working them still as the mainstay of German agriculture. Those farms by the basic rules of manufacturing could never be as efficient as large industrialised farms in use elsewhere in the world, its exactly the same problem but in a different skin as the problems that the Germans had with manufacture in WW2. Food shortages were not as bad for most of WW2 as they were for WW1 to my knowledge, food shortages started early and continued for a large majority of WW1, but the time of Germanies hunger was far smaller in WW2, it was the point when their railways were pounded into the dirt and when they lost the ability to pillage conquered countries that things started to go wrong (as Archangel says it was a deliberate move to starve the east of Europe in order to steal their food to feed Germany, they knew they couldn't feed them when they went east.), Germany had much more robust trade in WW2, they had land links into the balkans and unquestioned control of the west of the continent so they were much more able to get for example imported wheat from Romania, fish from the Scandanavian countries etc, so until those links were cut in late 1944 and early 1945 they were able to keep up a reasonable diet for their populace, this was not as a result of Nazi domestic policy but as a result of them being able to employ the means of easing hunger that they couldnt use in WW1, that of import. The solutions the Nazi's seemed to identify was that of expanding the current agricultural system rather than improving, transplant German farmers east and have them Aryanise it by taking their way of life with them, i dont know how they planned to organise the new settlements in the east, to be honest i would guess that the Germans didn't either, setting up the neccesary infrastructure for mass farming in a new and war torn area of the world was beyond the Germans ability to create, they had their strategic transport network running on fumes for most of WW2 as it was.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 22:45
|
|
|
It taking forty tons of potatoes to make enough industrial alcohol for one V-2 wasn't much of a help, I bet
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 23:29
|
|
|
I realise this is a broader question than just matters military, but I'd be interested in your thoughts anyway. How long could the Hanoverian occupation of England really have lasted? I was reading an idiotic alt-history about how this German aristocrat (Elisabet Saxe-something or other) would have been Queen of the Three Kingdoms if the Acts of Settlement and of Union had stuck, and the author was talking about how King Charles III nearly turned back at Derby during the Restoration in '45. But would that really have changed anything? The Hanoverian regime was pretty unstable as is and it's surprising it lasted as long as it did. Is there anything to this at all?
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2016 23:47
|
|
|
JaucheCharly posted:Are you familiar with the writings of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson? I could totally see him accompanying your regiment and fire guns out of the windows for fun. He once got evicted for that.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 00:52
|
|
|
Nude Bog Lurker posted:I realise this is a broader question than just matters military, but I'd be interested in your thoughts anyway. Counterfactuals are usually bullshit, and this is definitely an example. The 45 didn't fail because of some chance military event, it failed because the English Tories said gently caress it, en masse, and stayed at home. The Jacobites were depending on an English rebellion, and it didn't happen. There's no way to rerun the sequence of events and come out with a Jacobite victory, unless you factor in the full-hearted support of a Continental power, or a complete change of heart among tens of thousands of rural English Tories.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 00:56
|
|
|
Polyakov posted:They spotted the lessons of WW1 but they didnt really identify the correct solution. This is going to be a little fuzzy because im not great on Nazi ideaology so someone may need to correct me. I can expand a bit on this as I'm reading a book on this rn. In addition to what you said a major part of the idea behind the family farms was that they had noticed that farmers had lots of children, so a faction (there were obviously still professional agrarian functionaries who were pushing for a properly efficient setup) figured that by making as many farms as possible with the available land you could turn the rural areas into a "Blutsquell" (blood fount) that created lots of Aryans in an attempt to improve the racial makeup. This process was called "aufnorden", literally to North up. Cities were the places where the race died in the view of these people between the race-mixing and the relatively few children. A law was passed, the Reichserbhofsgesetz, whereby farmers with a flawless racial record could get special legal protections for their farms and a special title (Bauer). Basically they tried to popularize the concept by making it attractive and prestigious. It was a pretty involved piece of social and eugenic engineering. The colonization of the East was a nonstarter. They never found more than 9000 (sic) settlers a year, with the numbers dropping even further as the urban economy picked up again in the first years of the 3rd Reich, and the program was exceedingly unpopular. People had learned what level of consideration for their preferences could be expected of the regime and worried that they might get thrown on trains and forcibly resettled, so some Gauleiter were just hushing the program up completely. You can imagine how long it would've taken them to settle all the conquered areas. So the Volk ohne Raum thing was a bit bollocks.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 03:00
|
|
|
Nude Bog Lurker posted:I realise this is a broader question than just matters military, but I'd be interested in your thoughts anyway. Not a chance. There is no way the Hannoverian dynasty would have anything like popular support. Maybe if it had been 1066 and they could have killed of most of the North like William did, but that poo poo don't fly in 1745. Besides, can you imagine how the reconciliation of 77 with the colonies would have gone with a German in charge? Just, lol.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 03:20
|
|
|
Are there any Star Forts in the vicinity of Munich or perhaps on the path from Berlin to Munich?
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 03:26
|
|
|
Taiping Tianguo Part 27 I'll go back and edit in the links to the old posts in the goldmined thread later. Right now I'm lazy. When I left off way back when, it was early 1860. The Taiping had just recalled their forces to the heavenly capital after a feint to the southeast, where they had destroyed the imperial siege camps and broken the imperial army, saving the movement from what seemed like certain doom. This plan was the brainchild of their new prime minister Hong Rengan, a cousin of the Heavenly King who has spent most of the last decade with foreign missionaries before recently returning to advocate reform and modernization along western lines. East... Always to the East With the Southern Imperial Barracks cleared away, the Taiping armies now have space to breathe, and a crucial decision to make. Do they strike east, towards the rich coastal provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu? This would replenish the treasury and could be a relatively easy campaign. Or do they strike west, back up the Yangtze to reclaim Jiujiang, Wuhan, and eventually Hunan? Securing the upper Yangtze would protect the capital and perhaps even open lines of communication with the Nian, Miao, and Panthay rebels to the west, or maybe even a pincer movement with Shi Dakai's wandering army. But achieving it would be a hard fight upstream against Zeng Guofan's fierce and competent Xiang army. In the end, it is Hong Rengan's scheme that wins the day. His proposal is the eastern campaign, but with a twist. He plans to take Shanghai and with it control of foreign trade. The Taiping will then use the vast sums of gold they have There is a crucial risk to this plan. It requires temporarily ceding the initiative in the west while Zeng Guofan advances toward Anqing. Anqing is well positioned, well provisioned, and strongly fortified, and can be expected to hold out for an extended siege. But the western theater cannot be neglected forever. Plans are made for a western offensive on both banks of the river, but with limited manpower and only a handful of talented commanders, they must wait until the eastern operations are complete. The initial push east in May of 1860 goes well. The imperialists under He Chun (the mediocre guy) and Zhang Guoliang (the unusually competent guy) had rallied about 20,000 survivors at Danyang (丹陽). Unfortunately for them, there is a tiny morale problem related to the inconsequntial issue of their troops never being paid. The demoralized soldiers break and flee at the first volley from the Taiping. He Chun escapes with his life but Zhang Guoliang is not so lucky, drowning in a river either in suicide or while trying to escape. Li Xiucheng buries him respectfully, while in far off Beijing the court will lament the loss of their best commander on the eastern front. Changzhou (常州)is the next stop for the rebel advance. Governor He Guiqing (河桂慶) panics upon the approach of the Taiping. His attempt to flee the city is momentarily halted by a protesting crowd fearing the consequences for the city if they are abandoned. The governor orders his bodyguard to fire on the crowd and presses through to make good his escape. Generals He Chun and Zhang Yuliang attempt to prepare a defense, intentionally burning down the town outside the walls, while mutinous and out of control soldiers burn and pillage the town inside. The situation is a shambles as the Taiping arrive, and the generals leave the city and abandon it to its own devices. Some of the defending soldiers defect to the Taiping while local militias attempt to fight on, leading to a horrific street by street bloodbath before the city is secured. He Chun, meanwhile, decides to pack it in and takes a fatal dose of opium. He Guiqing for his part will eventually be executed for his cowardice and incompetence, the highest ranking official to suffer that fate. Suzhou (苏州), the economically and strategically vital center of southern Jiangsu, is seized without a fight at the start of June, in contrast to Changzhou. Taiping infiltrators manage to enter the city disguised as refugees. They then toss ropes over the walls and open the gates for the Taiping army. The populace of the city, meanwhile, lifts barely a finger to stop them. The recent victories have restored the Taiping aura of inevitability, and it seems futile to resist. Additionally, imperial troops retreating/deserting following their defeats have done the usual over the top pillaging on their way through, destroying any goodwill the dynasty may have had. The only group still motivated to oppose the Taiping are the terrified upper classes, but they translate this sentiment into action via mass suicide more so than military resistance.  The Taiping, for their part, will reciprocate their warm welcome, lowering taxes in Suzhou and establishing subsidized loans and social programs for the benefit of the common people. Harsh laws against vices such as footbinding, opium, and even theater are promulgated, but most evidence points to enforcement being lax, especially compared to the early days of the movement. Li Xiucheng's fairminded administration makes a lasting impression. Memorials erected to him in the city somehow survived to this day. Try to find them on your next visit, and feel free to stop by his former residence in Suzhou which is maintained as a museum. Plenty of smaller communities will not be not so lucky. The old believers, the true Taiping, are courteous and pay for everything they take. But anyone can grow long hair, and plenty of recent Taiping recruits (or even just straight bandits) commit awful atrocities. Li's personal benevolence is limited by his reach. The disciplined Taiping army and its general can do little to control the wolves that prowl constantly along its fringes, and prey in the no man's lands between areas of firm control for the Taiping or the Qing. Once a village was firmly under Taiping control though, life largely resumed almost identically to before, though with the traditional local gentry displaced in administration by figures from lower classes, providing some germ of truth to the PRC class war version of the movement. The pattern is repeated throughout eastern Jiangsu and the Taiping advance is rapid. The imperial forces do,however, achieve one major success amidst this general collapse. They prevent the Taiping from retaking Zhenjiang, and so deny them control of the river and access to the northern bank. As the imperial forces are slowly reassembled, most of their manpower for the time being will be directed toward protecting this vital strongpoint. The Taiping armies seem certain to march straight into Shanghai. There are nominally thousands of imperial soldiers in Jiangsu, but most of them are garrisons of questionable effectiveness that do little but drain imperial coffers. Tuanlian militias will provide some benefit by keeping their home villages loyal as the cities around them fall, but no more could be expected of them (and even then, Jiangsu sees more rural communities flipping to the Taiping than has been typical elsewhere). Yong mercenary contingents are present, but these are nowhere near as professional or effective as the yongying armies of Hunan. However, there is still Shanghai itself, and this city has now become only nominally Qing. It's trade taxes, i.e. the city's reason for existing, are now collected by foreigners, and the city's defense will soon be entrusted to them as well. Considering that the last attempt at indigenous militia organization in the city had led directly into the Small Swords rebellion, it seems there aren't many good options other than hoping the foreigners can be engaged to defend the city. Any major foreign assistance will however come at a time and place determined by foreign authorities and in accordance with their own narrow interests. Yankee Ingenuity Foreigners had been involved on the fringes of the struggle for some time, as mercenaries for one side or the other, especially helpful when expertise with foreign made artillery was required. This practice was discouraged by the British, partially for diplomatic reasons and partially because many of these mercenaries were deserters from British ships, as the adventurous were lured by salaries higher than those of sailors and far, far higher than those earned by Chinese soldiers. The spring of 1860, though, would see the first emergence of a purely foreign force. As Shanghai swelled with refugees from the upper classes bringing lurid stories of Taiping atrocities, panic swells and the authorities there looked for an answer. The daotai, Wu Xu(吴煦), will try to raise a new foreign manned army with the assistance of Yang Fang(楊坊), who is not an official at all but a banker. This private army will be raised off the books of either the Qing court or any western authority, necessitating considerable financial chicanery. The solution to their problem of command comes in the form of an American adventurer by the name of Frederick Townsend Ward.  F. T. Ward, photograph Ward's past was complicated. He had been a sailor and had come to China more than once in the early 1850's. Subsequently, he had traveled to Mexico, then been involved in notorious filibuster William Walker's ill-fated invasion of Nicaragua. The next stop was a stint in French service in Crimea, giving him the required knowledge of military affairs, or at least enough to fake it. By 1860 he was back in China on a river steamboat. He runs into the Taiping during the course of this and may well have joined them had they made him an attractive offer. As it is, it is the imperials who are giving him his chance at fortune and glory, and it is irresistible for a man with a seemingly unquenchable thirst for action. Ward begins drilling his men outside the city, a few hundred soldiers to start. They will use the latest in modern weaponry and up to date drill. The hope is that this can be a spearhead force to break through enemy strongpoints and leave the subsequent exploitation and defense up to regular troops. Ward has several Caucasian officers, among them fellow American Henry Burgevine, but the bulk of his rank and file are Filipinos, or "Manilamen" as they are called. This new force will not be popular. Both the British and the court in Beijing will demand its dissolution due to the sensitive diplomatic issues it presents. In both cases, it will be explained as a private initiative of local merchants that is outside Wu Xu's control. The early record of the force, however, is not illustrious. They are ordered to retake the nearby city of Songjiang ( 松江) in June. With no heavy guns, Ward decides to try to scale the wall in a surprise night attack. His men, in proper mercenary fashion, are extremely drunk and not particularly stealthy, and the alert defenders gun them down. Undeterred, Ward recruits replacements and tries again in July, this time with two new foreign-made cannons. They successfully blow down the outer gate and rush through, only to discover that there was a second inner gate that couldn't be seen from outside. The Taiping get medieval and dump pots of burning sulfur on the hapless men below. Eventually, though, they manage to blow a hole in inner gate with a sack of powder and get into the city. The inner gate secured, they sit tight and wait for the much larger main army of imperial regulars to arrive. The Taiping garrison, composed mostly of young boys, old men, and otherwise non-frontline troops, declines to fight and flees the city. Most of his men are dead or wounded, but it has been a glorious success and Ward gets right back to recruiting. Come August, he attacks Qingpu(青浦 ), seeking to replicate the success at Songjiang. Qingpu, however has modern guns and a foreign commander of their own, a mercenary named Savage who would have the poor manners to die before explaining any details of his backstory to historians. In three assaults Savage gets the better of Ward, killing or driving his men off and shooting Ward right in the face. Undeterred, the foreign arms corps recruits yet more men and seeks to honor their incapacitated, ain't pretty no more leader by two weeks later launching another assault on Qingpu. This time they are accompanied by the much larger native Chinese army, and it can be expected to go better. This attack goes even worse. Li Xiucheng himself shows up on their flank and crushes both armies. The bedraggled survivors scurry back to Shanghai, all imperial accomplishments of the past two months reversed at a stroke. The Foreign Arms Corps effectively ceases to exist, but the idea is not dead.  F.T. Ward, artist's intepretation The Great Shanghai Turkey Shoot Li's army had steadily advanced through June, seizing the cities of Kunshan(昆山), Jiading (嘉定), Taicang (太倉) and Qingpu with similar ease to their prior advances. They then waited for some time, while trying to make diplomatic overtures by letter and via missionary channels. They send a letter stating their intent to occupy the city to the foreign consuls at Shanghai, and also invite missionaries to come to Suzhou and Nanjing and witness their benevolent intentions for themselves. It is to little avail. British ambassador Frederick Bruce and French ambassador de Bourbolon had already made up their minds that the future of China still lay with the Qing, and the possibility of serious negotiation with the Taiping was not even considered. While many in the diplomatic corps and missionary establishment will advise a more even handed approach, Bruce sticks to his guns, and as the man on the spot the entire British Empire will follow his lead. His main job was to get a new treaty out of the Qing, and the Qing ceasing to exist would complicate that considerably. The ambassadors are similarly dismissive of Taiping Christianity, and do their best to discourage curious missionaries from making the journey to Taiping territory. (The Americans, while having similar views, will be increasingly irrelevant thanks to some kind of internal dispute going on in that mysterious far off land.)  Not sure what to make of the lack of reply, Li Xiucheng finally moves out in August. Upon arrival on the outskirts of Shanghai the Taiping easily eject imperial forces in the suburbs, progress hindered primarily by fires which had been set by French troops before their arrival. The French also committed rape, murder, and pillage against the civilians whose houses they were burning down, for reasons that are unclear beyond being dickheads. Amid the fighting with the imperialists in the suburbs a French priest and Chinese convert are allegedly shot and killed by the Taiping, which might have caused diplomatic trouble for the Taiping if that die had not already been cast long ago. The Taiping do mark the Catholic church with a notice that the structure and its inhabitants are not to be harmed, in keeping with their assurances given to the French ambassador years earlier. They next make an attempt to approach the city itself, only to met with a blistering fusillade from foreigners atop the walls, their paths of fire now cleared by the destruction of the suburbs. The Taiping repeatedly attempt to come closer to the walls, waving flags, only to get no reply but hot lead from a mix of British, French, and Sikh defenders. Chinese and foreign reports all agree that not a single shot is fired by the Taiping, but the men on the wall nevertheless find this action to be great sport. In one hosed-up-if-true anecdote, a missionary who had been caught up in the fighting in the outer city is escorted out of the flaming suburbs to the wall by a Taiping detachment. Once he is safely lifted over the wall, his rescuers are shot in the back. The next day, heavily armed steamboats join in on the bombardment as well. Several hundred Taiping soldiers will be dead by the time they give up and abandon hope of a peaceful occupation, or even of a civil reply. Li retreats from the vicinity of the city, personally wounded by shrapnel and not wishing to risk engaging imperial forces while still in range of foreign guns. Shortly after this, He receives a letter sent weeks earlier that had been lost in the In any case, the Taiping and the foreigners, as it turns out, have very different concepts of neutrality. Li hoped that neutrality meant strictly taking no active part in the conflict between the Qing and the Heavenly Kingdom. The foreigners interpreted neutrality as, "anywhere we go in China we are sovereign, and gently caress your mum if you don't stay out of the way of our glorious flag." Since defending a Qing city and killing Taiping soldiers was done in their own self interest rather than out of any affection for the Qing, it was still very much a neutral policy, from their point of view. Despite this the Taiping still hold out hope for eventual accommodation and will scrupulously avoid conflict with foreign powers. The international press will meanwhile castigate the British government for gunning down apparently friendly Christians to prop up a corrupt, openly hostile Qing government, viewing it as baffling hypocrisy. You see, there is a minor issue that has been percolating simultaneously with all this activity going on in Jiangsu. 500 miles to the north, the same bunch of hairy barbarous foreigners saving Shanghai from the Taiping are in a shooting war with the Qing that threatens to bring the dynasty to its knees. ---------------------- So yeah, next update we'll catch up on the Arrow War. No idea when that will be as another babby is imminent and the concept of spare time will soon be a cruel joke.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 04:27
|
|
|
All this talk of Nazi economy reminds me of the Nazi use of slave labor, which reminds me of another WW2 family anecdote. One of my great-uncles was in a labor camp in Klagenfurt. Before the war, great-uncle was an apprentice to a Hungarian smith in Yugoslavia. (while industrialization kinda makes smiths useless, there was still plenty of need for one in rural areas) The smith was planning to let him inherit the trade, and waiting to see if things work out well enough between his daughter and great-uncle for them to marry, with the backup plan of adopting my great-uncle if this fails. WW2 interrupts everything, Yugoslav government signs the Tripartite Pact, only to get taken down a few days later by a combination of angry officers and angry population, and the Nazis are promptly told to gently caress off. Cue sudden Nazi invasion without a declaration of war and a campaign of bloody retribution against the populace. The smith found out that great-uncle was on the short-list for being sent to a concentration camp (I forgot which one exactly, but it was among the nastier ones), and pulled every connection he had, cashed in on every favor he was owed, bribed every man who needed bribing, and made up a bunch of bullshit about great-uncle's "racial" profile to have him reassigned to the relative safety of a labor camp jump across the border. Great-uncle was 17 at this point. The Hungarian smith was eventually executed by Hungarian fascists. No idea what exactly it was that pissed them off - I imagine he was eventually found guilty of being a decent human being in a world gone insane, and became yet another good man in an unmarked grave somewhere in Europe. I don't know what happened to his daughter, but my best guess would be that she suffered the same fate. Anyway, great-uncle ends up in the labor camp, and was often sent out to work his trade (or just provide manual labor) in the surrounding countryside. Due to the nature of his work and the very good recommendations he received from his boss, he was treated relatively humanely. (Note the 'relatively' here. He was still a slave laborer considered subhuman by his captors) As the war went on, more and more local men ended up being shipped off to the Eastern Front, and being a tall attractive young man (for reference, my father is 6'3'' and he tells me his uncle was taller than him) in an increasingly unmanned environment, great-uncle ended up in a frequent conundrum of "do I say yes, have some fun and maybe something extra to eat and a favor to call, and get shot if we get caught, or do I say no and get shot if she doesn't take no for an answer and puts me in a situation where it's her word over mine?" When my father retells what the uncle told him, it sounds like a bawdy tale, but when I asked him the details and how great-uncle was telling it, there's stuff implying that great-uncle didn't really enjoy recalling this, and that it was an extremely hosed up way to survive. Which makes sense, especially considering what the situation would be thought of as if the sexes were reversed. Still, I do have to wonder if I happen to have a bunch of Austrian cousins that I'll never meet. It wouldn't even be that much of an unusual situation, there have been cases of old Germans trying to discover their fathers in Serbia relatively recently. There was even a particularly heartwarming tale of a couple who were genuinely in love, spent years trying to find each-other, and the father was eventually identified by the German son tracking down the village his father was supposed to have come from and finding his mother's photograph framed in one of the houses. Anyway, great-uncle returned to our family's home village after the war, age 21, only to find out that everyone moved out. The whole family was given the right to a large house and land in Vojvodina thanks to his sister's wartime exploits (the great-aunt I mentioned a few times in the previous thread) and he booked a train to there. He ended up seated next to a skinny short girl with a strange sort of rugged charisma about her. Turns out, she was a survivor of the Stara Gradiška extermination camp, having escaped it in the middle of the winter and fleeing through the snow-covered forest half-naked and completely alone until she lucked into some people who sheltered her. With the war over, she had no idea about what to do with life. By the time the train arrived to its station, the hulk and the titch were head-over-heels in love, and ended up marrying not too long after that. With the rebuilding of Yugoslavia under way, there was plenty of work for a big-rear end smith and his tiny assistant. They had two daughters. 
my dad fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Aug 28, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 05:05
|
|
|
Military equipment  : Is there any particular reason the Soviet Union used 76, 152 and 203 mm guns (i.e. gun caliber in inches) instead of round numbers in metric?
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 06:51
|
|
|
DiHK posted:Are there any Star Forts in the vicinity of Munich or perhaps on the path from Berlin to Munich? erfurt's got a nice one edit: here you go, franconia is near bavaria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marienberg_Fortress HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 08:17 on Aug 28, 2016 |
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 08:07
|
|
|
James Garfield posted:Military equipment Short answer: it's a legacy of how influential English industry and English engineers were in the late 19th century. You hear up with tooling for one industry bought from the Brits then build your own stuff to that spec. Eventually you mostly get onto metric but there is always some remanebt.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 08:44
|
|
|
James Garfield posted:Military equipment They date back to Imperial Russia. Also see 7.62mm rifles which are .30 cal (or in Russian parlance, three line rifles -a line was a tenth of an inch).
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 08:48
|
|
|
When I was a kid I viewed the Nazis as cartoonish supervillains; as the years passed I grew to see the shades of grey in the situation; and after six months of reading this one thread I've come back around to the cartoonish villains idea.....
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 10:31
|
|
|
Tree Bucket posted:When I was a kid I viewed the Nazis as cartoonish supervillains; as the years passed I grew to see the shades of grey in the situation; and after six months of reading this one thread I've come back around to the cartoonish villains idea..... Depressingly it's still a shades of grey situation since the real pieces of poo poo were perfectly happy to worm their tentacles into a lot of people who were innocent or just wanted to keep their heads down, either coercively or via outright force. The poor sod from the Dirlewanger situation is SS because he got conscripted, for instance.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 11:09
|
|
|
my dad posted:words Goddamn dude. Chaining off of my dad's post, my grandmother was alive in Germany in WWII and told some pretty harrowing stories to me as a child. She was in Darmstadt, Germany, the daughter of a high-ish ranking German soldier by the name of Hess (not Rudolph Hess) who wasn't so much a Nazi as he was a Wehrmacht officer. She told me about watching Hitler rise to power as a young girl, and how at first people thought he was some kind of a joke, something that would just sorta burn out and go away. She said that people like her father, intelligent people, could see through his bullshit, said that he often "literally foamed at the mouth" and poo poo. Anyway, one day she said they stopped laughing, and not long after the war started she started seeing cattle cars with arms sticking out of them driving through town. And she remembers looking at her parents and wondering "how the hell did you let this happen?". She lived in Darmstadt until 1944, when the town started getting bombed rather heavily by the Allies. Her parents, fearing for her safety after repeated bombings nearly erased the town and killed most of her friends, moved her to another city. Until the day she died my grandmother was terrified of thunderstorms, as they reminded her of the Allied bombing raids. She would hide under tables, tears in her eyes, trembling, and no amount of reasoning or calming would bring her out. It was horrifying and tragic to watch as a child, something that will stick with me for the rest of my life. A lot of kids growing up learned about WWII and thought it was cool to see old footage of American planes bombing the poo poo out of Germany, but I grew up knowing that there were also civilians on the end of those bombs who were just as terrified as those in London during the Blitz. Her parents moved her to Dresden, btw. I can post more of her stories if people are interested in hearing that perspective.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 13:43
|
|
|
HEY GAL posted:edit: here you go, franconia is near bavaria That's perfect cause we're already swinging by Rothenburg on the way down to Munchin. I was gonna try and squeeze another day out of Berlin and go to Spandau Citadel but we'd end up missing day 1 of Oktoberfest... anyway Mariendurg has neater looking approaches. Thanks!
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 13:47
|
|
|
Thread title suggestion: "Ask us about Military History: Operation Just Post".
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 14:35
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Short answer: it's a legacy of how influential English industry and English engineers were in the late 19th century. You hear up with tooling for one industry bought from the Brits then build your own stuff to that spec. Eventually you mostly get onto metric but there is always some remanebt. Though it does replicate English units, Russian use of inches goes back to Peter I. Peter's huge boner for navies and The West are the cause, not late 19th century industrialization.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 14:41
|
|
|
my dad posted:The Hungarian smith was eventually executed by Hungarian fascists. No idea what exactly it was that pissed them off - I imagine he was eventually found guilty of being a decent human being in a world gone insane, and became yet another good man in an unmarked grave somewhere in Europe. I don't know what happened to his daughter, but my best guess would be that she suffered the same fate. Man, I'm not used to thinking of individuals in mass killings as people who had lives of their own until they didn't.  Military history makes you build up such a cognitive dissonance to deaths. One person you know dying can make you depressed for a while, and if you knew everybody who died in any given war, it would make you depressed until the end of time.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 14:45
|
|
|
SlothfulCobra posted:Man, I'm not used to thinking of individuals in mass killings as people who had lives of their own until they didn't. You'd think but my uncle and grandma don't seem to bear that out. They all seem to have a bit of a "It's a shame but it was what was happening" kind of view on it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 14:49
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 17:18 |
|
spectralent posted:Depressingly it's still a shades of grey situation since the real pieces of poo poo were perfectly happy to worm their tentacles into a lot of people who were innocent or just wanted to keep their heads down, either coercively or via outright force. The poor sod from the Dirlewanger situation is SS because he got conscripted, for instance. I think the term shades of poo poo be termed here.
|
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2016 15:07
|
|
