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spectralent posted:I still think there's valid criticism of Rommel, given that he's making all sorts of daring and dramatic attacks during what is, essentially, garrison duty. For some reason he's trying to capture the Suez, despite the fact his mission statement is just "prevent the italians from totally collapsing". Yeah but if you can push the Brits out and get the Suez canal, that makes for a much longer supply line to Asia. (And for supplies going through the Middle East to Russia!) Its not like he said "gently caress it, off to the Suez!" and went on his merry way. He counter-attacked Wavell with such success that they shipped HIS rear end to India. They regained almost all (if not all) the ground the Italians lost a year prior. Continuing the push through Egypt made sense at the time. And then Rommel's supply lines get stretched to their limits, Malta doesn't fall, the Italian Navy fails to perform, Operation Torch and setbacks on the frontline all pile up until it becomes insurmountable and anyone that doesn't get evacuated to Sicily/Italy is forced to surrender.
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Aug 29, 2016 16:15
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Cyrano4747 posted:Really this thread skews way to hard on the Axis powers being stupid. They weren't the unstoppable evil geniuses of post war myth and wheraboo fantasy but they also weren't the loving keystone cops. Let me tell you how and why the Panther tank is the worse tank of the war. Furthermore,
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Aug 29, 2016 16:17
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Jobbo_Fett posted:And the Fascist rhetoric of "We have but to kick the door open for the entire structure to collapse" was looking rather good in the early stages of Barbarossa with the massive land grabs and deep penetrations. Ask us about Military History II: massive land grabs and deep penetrations. FAUXTON posted:Oh sure shack Yamamoto up with someone who was a Russian admiral, that'll go well. I can just imagine Yamamoto poo poo-talking Jones about stuff that happened centuries after his death. Aw man, this would own. "We must attack decisively, the future of the empire and the honor of our families are at stake! John? Seriously, have you attacked yet John" "I'll begin attacking when you suck my dick!"
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Aug 29, 2016 16:21
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Cyrano4747 posted:Really this thread skews way to hard on the Axis powers being stupid. They weren't the unstoppable evil geniuses of post war myth and wheraboo fantasy but they also weren't the loving keystone cops. I don't think anyone said Rommel did that but overall the nazis were kind of lovely at logistics and this almost certainly had to do with their top-down focus on concepts like will and fanaticism, as well as having the ego to think that early wins meant all their wars would be quick enough they could reform when they'd won.
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Aug 29, 2016 16:21
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Cyrano4747 posted:Really this thread skews way to hard on the Axis powers being stupid. They weren't the unstoppable evil geniuses of post war myth and wheraboo fantasy but they also weren't the loving keystone cops. If anything, they were more Buster Keaton levels of stage incompetence, violence, depression and mental illness.
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Aug 29, 2016 16:28
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Cyrano4747 posted:Really this thread skews way to hard on the Axis powers being stupid. They weren't the unstoppable evil geniuses of post war myth and wheraboo fantasy but they also weren't the loving keystone cops. It's really impressive they got as far as they did, given the near impossible strategic goals they were aiming for. But it's like a skateboarder doing some really impressive grind then slipping and crushing his nuts on the rail, the YouTube comments are gonna focus on the wrecked bozack. I do think it's curious that wehraboos obsess over the big guns and thick armor of late war German tanks, when the truly impressive Nazi victories over France and Russia consisted of clowning opponents with bigger guns and thicker armor.
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Aug 29, 2016 16:28
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lenoon posted:stage incompetence, violence, depression and mental illness.
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Aug 29, 2016 16:29
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HEY GAL posted:yyyyyyyello Gonna lay down my thesis Down by the riverside Down by the riverside Down by the riverside Gonna lay down my thesis Down by the riverside Down by the riverside Down by the riverside I ain't gonna study war no more Study war no more Ain't gonna study war no more I ain't gonna study war no more Study war no more Ain't gonna study war no more
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Aug 29, 2016 16:31
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The Battle of El Alamein though, its amazing Rommel managed to hold on for as long as he did and to actually extract the majority of the army out and back to Tunisia. The Allies had such a material, numbers...everything advantage, that on paper, the entire Afrika Korps should have been destroyed.
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Aug 29, 2016 16:32
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Cyrano4747 posted:Re: Rommel : You're going off wildly in a lot of directions with this post and you need some facts to give it backbone. The Italians did get some of France. Some was annexed, some was occupied. They were also going to get Nice and Corsica eventually. Also, the Italians had been in Libya before Mussolini, before WWI even, it was pretty important to them.
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Aug 29, 2016 16:33
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Saint Celestine posted:the entire Afrika Korps should have been destroyed. They were, it just took almost six months to gather every member of the Africa Korps onto the Tunisian coast.
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Aug 29, 2016 16:36
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In the run-up to WW2 it is worth noting that the Nazi regime very much doubled down on agricultural protectionism, I’ve just had a re-skim of some of my books and I’m going to try and have a look at some bits of German Agricultural policy especially under the Nazi's. Pre Nazi regime Agricultural protectionism started with Bismarck, in an effort to win over the roughly 50% of the working population involved in farming at the time of German unification he instituted the first grain tariffs to protect German agriculture which put a brake on the decline of the entire sector for a very long time, until well after WW2 the German economy would still have a large quantity of essentially subsistence farmers, coming out of WW1 the agricultural voting block was very much right leaning, the major parties of the left, the Social Democrats and the Communists didn't appeal to them and never really had a credible plan to address their concerns, so they stayed on the right with the DVNP and the NSDAP both of whom were preaching protectionism and tariffs to protect Germanys agriculture. It was the Agricultural lobby that was a large part in twisting Hindenburg’s arm into approving of a coalition between the DVNP and the NSDAP, he owned a large estate himself and had vested interests in agriculture so I’m sure it didn’t take a great deal of persuading. The Agrarian lobby wanted a government that would unilaterally act in order to protect their interests, ignoring or abrogating the trade deals of the Weimar government, the party most willing to entertain that was ultimately the Nazi’s. They had been hit hard by the chaos of commodity prices in the late 20’s and early 30’s, caused in a large part by American economic measures to deal with the depression, and this radicalised them to the far right. The Weimar republic tried to break up the large land owners, especially in the east, they tried to resettle peasants onto the large estates there to farm the land by making it a social obligation, there was compulsory purchase of some of the land held by the large estates to bring the total proportion of land owned by the large estates down to 10%. However this was bitterly opposed by the landowners and little progress was made, failing to satisfy the Agricultural lobby. It is also interesting that at around this point Herbert Backe wrote his thesis, (who he is will come up later, but he was to become a prominent Nazi and agricultural administrator.) in 1926 for his PhD in Agricultural science he wrote “The Russian Grain Economy as the Basis for the People and Economy of Russia.” He posited that only by the infiltration of foreign ethic elements of higher quality could the Russian Agricultural sector develop, the ethnic elements of higher quality of course being the Germans. This would return when Backe would push for the SS to be the implement of this change, to clear out the racially inferior and make way for his ethnic elements of higher quality. Early Nazi policy. People are I’m sure familiar with the Nazi work creation programs, but especially in East Prussia agriculture was a huge part of it, Gauleiter Koch adopted a huge program of essentially forced labour, he created great “Camps of Comradeship” where unemployed men engaged in heavy earth moving to prepare the land for agricultural colonist, and political education, one of the very early concentration camps was employed here and accredited as a work creation venture. Goebbels trumpeted the East Prussian miracle across Germany with Koch proudly announcing that he had “cleansed” his province unemployment and this effort was repeated in many other regions of Germany. Low efficiency agriculture is a great way of employing lots of people as it requires no real skill just a degree of physical fitness and as a result the Nazi government employed it extensively. Agriculture was originally headed up by Hugenberg from 1931-33 he was the head of the other German far right party, the DNVP, but he managed to create a major diplomatic embarrassment by demanding the return of Germanys colonies and a right to expand in the east, he wasn’t backed in this by Hitler and resigned, consigning him and his party to oblivion, he was replaced by a particularly virulent Nazi in the person of Richard Walther Darre, (One of the top echelon of the SS.) It is worth noting at this juncture that in the peace settlement of WW2 Germany had lost an awful lot of land, fertile farmland was lost to Denmark and Poland while they still had a large proportion of the population who lived in those areas who moved into Germany proper to feed. Also that German farmers in general were very VERY poor, like couldn’t afford shoes for their children poor, working low yield arable crops as subsistence never made anyone rich but it especially hurt the 9 million or so Germans employed at this time in that field and their families, Germans in general were significantly poorer than Britons at this time, it would have been exceedingly foolish for any bank to really lend to them to buy new equipment or land and they had zero chance of affording the money themselves, corporations were more interested in manufacturing because that was where Germanys export money lay, indeed Nazi policy at this time was to encourage that to try and address Germanys crippling foreign exchange problem. The Nazi party for idealogical reasons more than anything refused to accept this, they were especially twitchy about food, a lot of their ideology came from a guy called Reverand Thomas Malthus, who wrote in the late 1790’s that unchecked population growth is exponential, while food supply growth is arithmetical, a country that could not feed itself was doomed to die out in large numbers, he advocated population control and early forms of eugenics. Hitler and the Nazis saw dependence on imported food as dooming them to economic stagnation and eventual race death. Nazi policy after full control. A very important figure in Germany in the early days was Darre, he created the grassroots Nazi organisation that came to dominate the politics of the Agricultural sector, from 1930-33 he built the largest political organisation in that sector and pretty much entirely subsumed it. He held rallies larger than the Nuremberg rallies on the occasion of the annual harvest and were highly attended by Nazi party elite. He very closely cooperated with the SS and was one of the major forces behind the SS’s transformation into a racially pure set of families, SS men wanting to marry had to apply to the office controlled by Darre. He believed firmly that German cultural identity was rooted in the peasant farmer, the enemies were the nomads and raiding tribes, and the modern equivalent was the racially impure population of the cities, naturally this was masterminded by rootless Jewish influences, they were responsible for the uprooting of peasants and turned their land into a commodity that capitalist forces could buy and sell at will. He held up the sinking birthrate as proof that the German population was born out of a deeply rooted connection to the soil could not sustain itself in an urban culture, urbanisation was to be another source of race death. Naturally the head of the Agricultural ministry holding this view put a major brake on the idea of any structural change in German agriculture. He and his deputy, Herbert Backe, viewed with hatred the large agricultural monocultures of the liberal democracies, and blamed this for the great famines in the 20’s (nearly 5 million people died after the end of WW1 due in a large part to infrastructure disruption and devestation, in really really broad strokes about their argument, had they been subsistence farmers the argument crudely went, they would not have starved). They both aimed for a secure national food supply and its attendant healthy farming community, both of which would create and ensure racial purity and virility for the German people. Land Shortage.  The Nazi ideological bit out of the way, but don’t worry it will return later, there was the very real problem of actual available land, Germany had one of the lowest areas of arable land per farmer in Europe, 74% of German farms farmed around 19% of the land area, the typical German farm area was 0.5 to 10 Hectares, farmers in these conditions were barely able to feed themselves and their families that relied entirely on family labour. They could not afford to employ anyone, even on the farms of 10 Hectares to 100 Hectares comprising about 25% of farms and about 40% of the land area, a lot of work was done by farm servants, live in people who received a significant amount of their pay in kind in the form of food and board. Peasants worked at least 12 hour days 6 days a week in order to survive. Blood and Soil. Darre and Backe proposed a new law in late 1933, it was based in what was called the Blut und Boden ideology, where a new category of farm, the Erbhof or Hereditary farm, was to be created as a breeding ground for racially pure peasant family. It would be immune to debt, insulated from the market via government guaranteed prices and passed down through these racially pure families. All farm owners between 7.5 and 125 Hectares were required to apply and were granted the title of Bauer. Naturally to succeed in the application you could not be Jewish, disabled or of inferior racial stock, these farms could not be sold or used as security for a loan. Essentially they could not be disposed of by their owners in any way. The Reichsbank proceeded to poo poo the bed at this juncture with Schacht denouncing it for undermining the finance market, Schmitt, the Minister for economic affairs said it would, “create a new breed of indolent state peasants with no interest in efficiency.” But Hitler approved and so it became law. Schacht tried to fight this by economic means by disallowing all Bauers from long term credits, but Darre would not be swayed. Eventually though the reality of the situation was worked out on a local level far from the prying eyes of the Nazi ideologues with the courts relaxing the rules and allowing limited use as collateral to gain loans. One decisive problem was that this new law really pissed off the peasant farmers whom it was intended to help, bits of the law were bent and adapted to try and entice people in, but they were not happy about it, though the major concern was that a large quantity of farms just did not meet the size criteria. Full governmental Control Starting in 1933 the government essentially ended the free market for agriculture in Germany, the prices were set centrally by the Reichsnaehrstand, and this unlike the Blut und Boden laws hit every part of the agricultural sector. It was another area that caused Schacht to voice his opposition, especially given the large budget allocated for the staff responsible for administrating it. This upset the peasants as well initially until they saw that the minimum prices they were guarantee were very generous indeed. However, the minimum prices did lead to a sharp spike in food prices for urban Germans, food prices had fallen for years but starting in 1934 they spiked hard, there were instances of a 10% spike in a single months which lead to panic buying and shortages, the RNS was instructed to avoid further price increases in order to maintain public confidence in the Nazi regime. The RNS bought up huge amounts of reserves in its early days but was soon faced with an unenviable task. It had to boost national self-sufficiency while not increasing the prices paid to farmers, the German economy was tenuous and Schacht was relentlessly attacking the RNS and Darre, he wanted to use their stockpiles of food to gain foreign exchange. Darre responded by creating the RNS’s own propaganda department and accused Schacht of being an agent of international freemasonry. Depite all of this the efforts of the RNS were partially successful, boosting supply of food by around a quarter. It installed large processing plants for enriched animal feed to feed the vast German pig herds. The Reichsbank was cutting the amount of money allocated to buy animal feed which is what resulted in this measure. Ersatz foods started to reappear at this stage, bad weather caused bad harvests in 34 and 37, there was talk of rationing but it was deemed politically unacceptable so they ran down their grain reserves and substituted maize and potato starch for flour in bread. They were forced to discretely ration butter and meat. However from 37-39 the recovering economy and better harvests enabled imports and yields to rebuild national food stocks. Long term solutions. There was a school of thought in the 30’s that advocated rationalisation and mechanisation, but essentially it was politically impossible, the forces of Nazi ideology and Agricultural pressure made it unattainable, the RNS calculated that it needed an extra 8 million Hectares of good farmland to become self-sufficient, they rejected the idea of overseas colonisation and fell in with the ideas of Mein Kampf, settlement in the east, displacement of the populace there and its settlement by Germans of appropriate racial stock to ensure the survival of the German race, the eyes of the German agriculture ministry were very clearly set on Poland and Ukraine, alongside Hitlers and the rest of the Nazi party. The Nazis essentially nationalised the majority of German Agriculture largely for political or idealogical ends, they had some success in boosting output but did not fix the central underlying inefficiencies. I dont know if they could have done, extensive farm mechanisation would have deeply cut into the heavy industry used to prepare for war, and that would have in all likelyhood have been unnaceptable to the main government, not to mention the vast social unrest it would have caused turfing millions of people out of their livelyhoods to replace them with machines may well have caused another massive social upheaval that the Nazi's were desperately trying to avoid throughout their reign.
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Aug 29, 2016 16:44
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cheerfullydrab posted:You're going off wildly in a lot of directions with this post and you need some facts to give it backbone. The Italians did get some of France. Some was annexed, some was occupied. They were also going to get Nice and Corsica eventually. Also, the Italians had been in Libya before Mussolini, before WWI even, it was pretty important to them. The Italians got a strip of France approximately 30mi x 10 mi including the town of Menton. That's a lovely deal. The promise of Nice and Corsica dated from after Case Anton in 1942, so it has no bearing on Italy's war aims in 1940. Cyrano's point was that the Italians were inherently interested in the area due to their history in the area, not that involvement in North Africa was somehow new.
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Aug 29, 2016 16:45
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Italian Navy fails to perform 
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Aug 29, 2016 16:45
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Flipswitch posted:What were the factors that kept the armed forces of Italy from succeeding? They seem to have been pretty shoddy throughout the War. Can anyone info dump me on Italy? Don't hear too much about them and a lot of films/books/games would have you think it was just a purely German affair. Also curious on how the Hungarians and Romanians contributed to the Axis war effort, including acting as speed bumps for T-34s. No investment in technical development, especially radar.
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Aug 29, 2016 16:51
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:No investment in technical development, especially radar. Also cost cutting measures that didn't turn out well. Cutting down m91 Carcanos to make m91/24 carbines is the funniest gun example. Turns out lopping off the end of a rifle with progressive rifling yields poor results! Edit: that said a lot of inter war militaries were cash starved. I don't know if Italy just got it worse or what. Does anyone know if Mussolinis govt monkeyed with the officer corps or anything?
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Aug 29, 2016 17:03
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Flipswitch posted:What were the factors that kept the armed forces of Italy from succeeding? They seem to have been pretty shoddy throughout the War. Can anyone info dump me on Italy? Don't hear too much about them and a lot of films/books/games would have you think it was just a purely German affair. Also curious on how the Hungarians and Romanians contributed to the Axis war effort, including acting as speed bumps for T-34s. The Romanians had oil, and this was the main cause of friction between Germany and Romania during the war. I unfortunately can't really name much else in the way of contributions they made, aside from men and lacklustre materiel. But at least they developed the IAR-80 and IAR-81! I love those planes even though they are largely forgotten. :romania: Hungary also had its fair share of men and materiel contributed to the war, but the only notable developments I can think of are the Turan tank, the Nimrod, and the Zrinyi. They did have plans for an indigenous Panther-like tank but it never got passed the prototype stage. Their small arms were generally outdated or bog-standard, and their aircraft were either derived from Italian designs or license-built copies of 109s. Oh, they did have a very little-known SMG in the form of the Danuvia 43M which was apparently well regarded, but I don't think I've ever seen a surviving example, and only once in photos. KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:No investment in technical development, especially radar. Basically this. I don't recall how good their fire control was, but they were basically a paper tiger. Their navy just wasn't up to date enough, and as a result they had a hard time controlling what is basically their own backyard. KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:The Italians got a strip of France approximately 30mi x 10 mi including the town of Menton. That's a lovely deal. The promise of Nice and Corsica dated from after Case Anton in 1942, so it has no bearing on Italy's war aims in 1940.
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Aug 29, 2016 17:04
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FAUXTON posted:Oh sure shack Yamamoto up with someone who was a Russian admiral, that'll go well. I can just imagine Yamamoto poo poo-talking Jones about stuff that happened centuries after his death. Eh, John Paul Jones was a certified mercenary and soldier of fortune. An extremely illustrious American naval commander who earned the moniker "Father of the American Navy," later a Russian admiral, and later tried to sell his services to Sweden who declined. I think JPJ's response to Yamomoto's poo poo talking would be "Ha ha, at least my battleships didn't run away from some destroyers and escort carriers!" In this naval dream team, I think Yamamoto would be a great man for the carrier division, but he badly needs someone who can keep him under control. Assuming such a man could be found... I think my nominations would be: Supreme Commander: Chester Nimitz Fleet Commander: Horatio Nelson Surface Command: John Jellicoe Carrier Command: Isoroku Yamamoto Submarine Command: Karl Donitz Destroyer Command: Arleigh Burke
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Aug 29, 2016 17:22
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What did Yamamoto do in his capacity as a carrier commander that was so remarkable? Pearl was a huge win but he won it wearing the overall commander's hat. I'd just as soon have Fletcher, they both made some mistakes, but Fletcher's fit better for the role of carrier commander, I'd think. Letting the Japanese make their getaway from Savo Island is no worse than Yamamoto's various piecemeal deployments.Cyrano4747 posted:Really this thread skews way to hard on the Axis powers being stupid. They weren't the unstoppable evil geniuses of post war myth and wheraboo fantasy but they also weren't the loving keystone cops. Last I checked his job was to prop up the Italians so Mussolini didn't suffer an embarrassing loss, and do so with a small allocation of forces and support. Everybody who decided on that job had their poo poo together and their priorities straight in that regard. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Aug 29, 2016 |
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Aug 29, 2016 17:23
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Basically this. I don't recall how good their fire control was, but they were basically a paper tiger. Their navy just wasn't up to date enough, and as a result they had a hard time controlling what is basically their own backyard. Broadly, Italian pre-war fire control design was pretty good, they bought the good designs of rangefinder and computer produced by Barr and Stroud towards the end of WW1 and followed an independent development path from that, they underinvested though so didnt manage to consistently modernise their battleships and as a result though they had the right technical idea it was not fully implemented. Their big defficiency was in training, they adopted laddering in the mid 30's as opposed to the RN who adopted it in 1918, they didnt train for Night Actions at all, often retiring rather than fighting at night after their first rather ugly suprise at the Battle of Matapan. They managed only really to damage a few RN ships and sink a couple of MTB's in surface engagements, whereas the RN racked up several Cruisers in return.
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Aug 29, 2016 17:30
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xthetenth posted:What did Yamamoto do in his capacity as a carrier commander that was so remarkable? Pearl was a huge win but he won it wearing the overall commander's hat. I'd just as soon have Fletcher, they both made some mistakes, but Fletcher's fit better for the role of carrier commander, I'd think. Letting the Japanese make their getaway from Savo Island is no worse than Yamamoto's various piecemeal deployments. For all his faults, Yamamoto was very innovative and is one of the big men to think of for transforming the aircraft carrier from a curiosity into a serious weapon of war. Certainly it took the Americans with their mammoth industrial capacity and vastly superior (and less literally murderous) organization and leadership to fully mature the carrier division into its modern incarnation, but as long as someone's around to rein him in I think Yamamoto is one of the premier guys for carriers in history. Fletcher or Halsey would also be fine, and Spruance would fit in nicely, but I also kind of wanted to look a bit more outside the USN and Royal Navy for the dream team theorizing. Unfortunately, the Americans and Brits do tend to dominate the winner's sides of naval history. Tōgō Heihachirō also bears serious consideration for the surface commander role, but the Russo-Japanese War was so weird in a lot of respects that I'm hesitant to put him over Jellicoe or Halsey.
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Aug 29, 2016 17:38
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 All this talk about admirals and no mention of Togo Heihachiro, a Samurai, an Admiral, and a god. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dg%C5%8D_Heihachir%C5%8D well ok, Nelson was mentioned and quote:Tōgō kept his journals in English, and wrote that "I am firmly convinced that I am the re-incarnation of Horatio Nelson."
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Aug 29, 2016 17:39
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Polyakov posted:Broadly, Italian pre-war fire control design was pretty good, they bought the good designs of rangefinder and computer produced by Barr and Stroud towards the end of WW1 and followed an independent development path from that, they underinvested though so didnt manage to consistently modernise their battleships and as a result though they had the right technical idea it was not fully implemented. Their big defficiency was in training, they adopted laddering in the mid 30's as opposed to the RN who adopted it in 1918, they didnt train for Night Actions at all, often retiring rather than fighting at night after their first rather ugly suprise at the Battle of Matapan. They managed only really to damage a few RN ships and sink a couple of MTB's in surface engagements, whereas the RN racked up several Cruisers in return. Ah, that explains it. I remember hearing about how the Italian Battleships weren't as good as their counterparts but I didn't know about the laddering / poor training. Not that I'm really surprised about the poor training stuff considering how the Air Force and Army also had that same issue
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Aug 29, 2016 17:39
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Cyrano4747 posted:
What about Hungary? Those guys were more determined than Italy, at least.
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Aug 29, 2016 17:40
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And as for generals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Suvorov quote:Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Васи́льевич Суво́ров, r Aleksandr Vasil‘evich Suvorov; 24 November [O.S. 13 November] 1729 or 1730 – 18 May [O.S. 6 May] 1800) was a Russian military leader and national hero. He was the Count of Rymnik, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, Prince of Italy, and the last Generalissimo of the Russian Empire. Suvorov is one of the greatest generals in history and is one of the few who never lost a battle, being undefeated in over 60 large battles while frequently having the numerical disadvantage.
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Aug 29, 2016 17:44
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Rommel was told in no uncertain terms that the logistical capacity available to him could not support a drive on Suez and his reaction was 'eh, work something out'. He advances until he can't advance any more, then gets stuck in a position where his mobile units are no longer mobile because he can't get enough fuel forwards to them. As he was told would happen. The Battle of El Alamein goes the way it does and couldn't go any other way because Rommel gave up all of his operational options to dig into a fixed position which Montgomery takes apart at will. Lets cover that again: Rommel, the general known for being good at blitzkrieg and manoeuvre warfare, chose to fight the most decisive battle of his career from a static position. A choice that played to all of the advantages of his opponent. And he got crushed.
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Aug 29, 2016 17:47
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The early condottieri class ships were hellishly vulnerable, too. That didn't help the Italians. Also if I had to go to WWII era war blind, I'd probably pick Frederick Sherman to command the carriers. His idea with SBDs as an inner screen against torpedo bombers when presented with a doctrinal lack of fighters was an interesting idea that shows a good grasp of what a carrier fight entails. Sucked for the dive bomber pilots but it did help the carriers out. Also Thach gets the highest position he can have while still in a cockpit. It's not an accident that Yorktown's strikes were so well put together. I have a feeling that there'd be a good number of Japanese guys in the group, considering how well put together their strikes were. I'd much sooner go with one of a few Americans (who also did a plenty good job of developing carriers as a weapon of war, look at the Fleet Problems for all the work they did. The only real thing they missed on was getting enough together to work out tactics for a proper carrier group) who didn't make mistakes like Yamamoto's and then pick Tanaka and/or Togo. I really need to get more reading done and start effortposting about carriers. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Aug 29, 2016 |
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Aug 29, 2016 17:52
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xthetenth posted:The early condottieri class ships were hellishly vulnerable, too. That didn't help. The man you want from the IJN is Genda Minoru, one of the primary minds behind the establishment of the Kido Butai as an organized striking force.
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Aug 29, 2016 17:54
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Cyrano4747 posted:Also cost cutting measures that didn't turn out well. Cutting down m91 Carcanos to make m91/24 carbines is the funniest gun example. Turns out lopping off the end of a rifle with progressive rifling yields poor results! I suspect Italy got it better than a lot of militaries in the early 30s, before Hitler was starting to look a threat - if you look at e.g. the US military of the time it's tiny and technically not even allowed to spend money on tanks at all. Their real problem is they re-armed too soon compared to everyone else; if World War 2 had happened in like 1935 they'd be in better shape, but they entered the war with most of their gear being obsolescent. That said, Italy was still too poor and unindustrialised country to do what Mussolini was trying to do with it.
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Aug 29, 2016 17:55
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Cythereal posted:Tōgō Heihachirō also bears serious consideration for the surface commander role, but the Russo-Japanese War was so weird in a lot of respects that I'm hesitant to put him over Jellicoe or Halsey. haha, drat ninja Polyakov posted:Broadly, Italian pre-war fire control design was pretty good, they bought the good designs of rangefinder and computer produced by Barr and Stroud towards the end of WW1 and followed an independent development path from that, they underinvested though so didnt manage to consistently modernise their battleships and as a result though they had the right technical idea it was not fully implemented. Their big defficiency was in training, they adopted laddering in the mid 30's as opposed to the RN who adopted it in 1918, they didnt train for Night Actions at all, often retiring rather than fighting at night after their first rather ugly suprise at the Battle of Matapan. They managed only really to damage a few RN ships and sink a couple of MTB's in surface engagements, whereas the RN racked up several Cruisers in return. What's laddering?
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Aug 29, 2016 17:56
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Cythereal posted:The man you want from the IJN is Genda Minoru, one of the primary minds behind the establishment of the Kido Butai as an organized striking force. Yep. Also trying to phone post is doing interesting things to the chronology of my posts.
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Aug 29, 2016 17:59
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Hogge Wild posted:
cook was just a captain and a god, this guy has one up on him
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Aug 29, 2016 18:08
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Cythereal posted:Tōgō Heihachirō also bears serious consideration for the surface commander role, but the Russo-Japanese War was so weird in a lot of respects that I'm hesitant to put him over Jellicoe or Halsey.
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Aug 29, 2016 18:10
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another contender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Farnese,_Duke_of_Parma pretty sure this dude is why belgium exists also tilly's teacher
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Aug 29, 2016 18:15
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Hogge Wild posted:What's laddering? Conventional fire control is shoot, wait for impact, observe splash, correct, shoot until you walk the salvos onto the target. It suffers badly from the target taking evasive action as the target state is changing between salvos. Laddering is shoot several salvos at different range estimates, see them all impact at different ranges in a short time span, hopefully either side of the target giving you a better idea of the targets actual range more quickly by giving you more information and a bracket value set in which the target lies.
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Aug 29, 2016 18:18
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So for the general nightmare team, we pretty much have to put Cadorna on it, right? Let's put him in charge of morale and discipline.
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Aug 29, 2016 18:21
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Empress Theonora posted:So for the general nightmare team, we pretty much have to put Cadorna on it, right? Let's put him in charge of morale and discipline. Bastard-in-Chief D'Annunzio was a Lieutenant General as well.
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Aug 29, 2016 18:24
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Fangz posted:What would people pick as a Nightmare Team of military leaders? Grigory Kulik in charge of armour, George McClellan in charge of military intel, Gaius Terentius Varro commanding the infantry, Napoleon Bonaparte handling the logistics? Gonna throw a shoutout to John Herr and Lloyd Fredendall.
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Aug 29, 2016 18:45
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i wonder if the guy who beat him is related to a guy I know about
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Aug 29, 2016 18:49
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HEY GAL posted:is it that you don't think he had an opponent that was worth the fight? Combination of that and, while Togo's victory was undeniably brilliant, the IJN - and the entire Imperial Japanese leadership - took completely the wrong lessons from the war in general and the landmark naval battle in particular. Many of Imperial Japan's problems in WW2 boiled down to them going into the war expecting it to be Russo-Japanese War 2: Pacific Boogaloo. While this is obviously no fault of Togo's and he was genuinely a great admiral, it nevertheless gives me pause considering putting him on a WW2-or-later naval dream team. If our naval dream team is being called forth for a ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny with WW1 or interwar technology, though (i.e. before the aircraft carrier and submarine have matured into serious instruments of war), Tōgō Heihachirō would definitely have a place of honor. WW2 is fascinating in looking at naval history with an eye towards the technology involved for their impact on how naval war is fought. If you asked me to divide the history of naval war into a few distinct eras based on how they're fought, I'd use the technology involved as guidelines. I think my answer would be something like this: Classical Age: Antiquity up through the 15th century or so. Gunpowder is nonexistent or in its infancy, most naval battles are fought by ramming and boarding. Ship-to-ship weapons are uncommon and rarely effective, mainly consisting of land weapons adapted to naval use like catapults and ballistas. Sailing technology itself is primitive and ships poorly maneuverable, and naval battles are mostly restricted to shallow waters close to shore. Gunpowder Age: 15th century through the early 19th. This is the Age of Sail, here delineated by the maturation of cannons and firearms into practical weapons. Ships become much more maneuverable and seaworthy, and battles in the open sea become common. Hulls are still exclusively wooden and cannons the dominant weapons, though new weapons and technologies including torpedoes, submarines, and steam power make their first appearances towards the end of this era. Ironclad Age: 19th century through WW1. Wooden-hulled ships give way to ironclads and soon all-metal construction, accompanied by significant advances like the breech-loading turret, the radio, and the maturation of coal-fired steam power. This is the age of the battleship and the big gun, when gun caliber and armor thickness are the primary maritime dick measuring tools. Submarines start to become serious weapons of war during this time, though, as the torpedo and mine mature alongside oil-fueled steam power and electric batteries. In the later years of this era, heavier than air flight and the aircraft carrier enter the field but are yet unproven. Distant Age: WW2 up through the 1970s. The aircraft carrier and submarine displace and soon entirely obsolete the battleship and the gun as the dominant weapons of war at sea. Ranges of naval engagements begin to escalate dramatically, soon opposing fleets begin to fight without ever laying eyes on their enemies. Airplanes and guided weapons - both torpedoes and missiles - become the weapons of choice, and nuclear power appears and matures. Stealth technology appears towards the end of this time. Stealth Age: 1980s through the present. Large-scale naval battles become rare outside of COIN style engagements, and with an eye towards the hypothetical large-scale naval clash the tug of war between weapon and armor seems to have finally been settled in favor of the former. If you can see it you can hit it, and if you can hit it you can kill it. Stealth and overwhelming firepower replace armor as the primary defense of warships facing threats like cruise missiles. In the absence of serious naval wars, it's impossible to say how things would "really" work out in such a conflict.
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Aug 29, 2016 18:51
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