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Someone in GBS is asking for nonfiction book recommendations and mentioned North Korea sounds interesting. I recommended the standard Pacific War books. Someone get in there and help convert someone to our sperg collective.
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Sep 2, 2016 07:44
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Alchenar posted:Also the reason everyone knows Rommel is because he was a committed Nazi, not because he was 'one of the good ones'. The Nazis put a massive propaganda effort into promoting his image and that's how he got famous as the Desert Fox during the war and while he was still a big fan of Hitler. Rommel was a classic member of the Prussian officer class who was perfectly happy with Hitler when he was murdering Jews and Slavs, but suddenly realised that he was a criminal when he started issuing orders that the army didn't want to follow. Rommel was from Württemberg actually. Probably another reason he and Hitler got along so well, what with mutual dislike of the Prussians.
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Sep 2, 2016 07:47
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Mycroft Holmes posted:Someone in GBS is asking for nonfiction book recommendations and mentioned North Korea sounds interesting. I recommended the standard Pacific War books. Someone get in there and help convert someone to our sperg collective. link, holmes
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Sep 2, 2016 07:49
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Hogge Wild posted:link, holmes Elementary, my dear Hogge
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Sep 2, 2016 07:54
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Cyrano4747 posted:It helps a LOT that Africa was the cleanest campaign from a public point of view. Yes, there was some lovely things with bedouins wanting to help the Nazis based on some mutual feelings re: Jews, but for the most part it was fought in a loving wasteland away from population centers over purely military objectives. Wait the what now? Jews had lived in North Africa for basically ever, the enmity didn't really kick off until the whole post-war Israel issue, which was decidedly not a thing in the 1940's. North African Jews were statistically worse off than the Jews in mainland Italy, which I've seen chalked up to: 1. Libyan Jews were brown. 2. The Italians who picked up and moved to Libya self-selected to be Fascist diehards, generally farther right, and already used to semi-casual warcrimes. 3. The Nazi's were more involved in Libya, relatively. I mean, the Germans also got involved in Italy proper but conditions at that point weren't particularly conducive to Jew hunting. The swingy nature of the North African front also led to a few seesaws of retaliations against people/tribes who'd sided one way or the other, and of course the initial Italian pacification of Libya, especially Cyrenaica was made possibly through mustard gas attacks against civilians, concentration camps, and machine gunning tribal herds to force the locals to the table. e: Not trying to be a dick, if you've got a source I'd love to see it.
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Sep 2, 2016 10:04
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the JJ posted:Wait the what now? Jews had lived in North Africa for basically ever, the enmity didn't really kick off until the whole post-war Israel issue, which was decidedly not a thing in the 1940's. That's not entirely true (assuming we're talking about Arab/Israeli issues in general). There was an Arab revolt in the 30s in Palestine, and Jews largely backed the British government against them. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bloody_Day_in_Jaffa for example. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 10:53 on Sep 2, 2016 |
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Sep 2, 2016 10:50
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is there anywhere colonialists haven't ruined by playing locals against one another rwanda edit, something like content: this guy would have either done well in the 17th century or been murdered, what a pity he was born now http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/magazine/albrecht-muth-and-viola-drath-georgetowns-worst-marriage.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 11:35 on Sep 2, 2016 |
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Sep 2, 2016 11:32
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Mycroft Holmes posted:Someone in GBS is asking for nonfiction book recommendations and mentioned North Korea sounds interesting. I recommended the standard Pacific War books. Someone get in there and help convert someone to our sperg collective.
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Sep 2, 2016 12:29
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bewbies posted:The " clean luftwaffe " thing has a bit more validity than the rest of the clean wehrmacht stuff . With a few notable exceptions (Goering Milch, Rudel etc) they by and large weren't particularly enthusiastic Nazis. This was mainly a coincidence as they tended to be drawn from the wealthy and educated, and the fact that highly trained service men like pilots couldn't be easily replaced by stooges, but it still meant that the Nazi ideology wasn't particularly ingrained in the organization except it's very highest levels. If Soldaten is anything to go by, a lot of the Luftwaffe were loving nutters. "It was our before-breakfast amusement to chase single soldiers over the fields with M.G. fire and to leave them lying there with a few bullets in the back... People [civilians] too." -speaking of the Polish war, German POWs April 1940
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Sep 2, 2016 13:12
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1. What was the size of the Danish Army in WW1? 2. Did the Entente ever consider opening up another front by landing along the Baltic coast, the way Churchill planned in WW2? 3. What was the deck gun on a WW1 German U-boat? I know the 88 and the 105mm weren't invented by then, and the boats were yet much smaller.
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Sep 2, 2016 15:20
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gradenko_2000 posted:2. Did the Entente ever consider opening up another front by landing along the Baltic coast, the way Churchill planned in WW2? They planned that so hard they built 3 giant battlecruisers to support it. Fisher and Churchill are, like, the dream team of "No seriously guys, I have a great idea!"
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Sep 2, 2016 15:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:1. What was the size of the Danish Army in WW1? 1. too small 2. of course they did 3. a big enough caliber gun 
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Sep 2, 2016 15:38
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spectralent posted:"People [civilians] too."
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Sep 2, 2016 15:42
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gradenko_2000 posted:3. What was the deck gun on a WW1 German U-boat? I know the 88 and the 105mm weren't invented by then, and the boats were yet much smaller. Actually German navy used several types of 88mm and 105mm guns in WW1, which is where the FlaK 18/36 inherited the caliber. eg. http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNGER_88mm-30_skc97.htm http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNGER_41-45_skc06.htm 50mm guns were also used http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNGER_5cm-40_skc93.htm More here: http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNGER_Main.php quote:2. Did the Entente ever consider opening up another front by landing along the Baltic coast, the way Churchill planned in WW2? Somewhere in Churchill's notes there must be a rough drawing of a plan to send tiny submarines up the Rhine past the Netherlands and then use them to blow all German bridges and dams along the way. Nenonen fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Sep 2, 2016 |
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Sep 2, 2016 15:45
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the JJ posted:Wait the what now? Jews had lived in North Africa for basically ever, the enmity didn't really kick off until the whole post-war Israel issue, which was decidedly not a thing in the 1940's. I was taking public perception, hence my dropping into the good chaps bs. Sorry if I wasn't clear.
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Sep 2, 2016 15:50
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I always felt sorry for Spain in the early part of the Peninsular War, every time they got their poo poo together or had a fantastic victory over the French suddenly a bigger gently caress off amount of reinforcements from France show up. Or the Junta in fighting begins.
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Sep 2, 2016 15:55
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ArchangeI posted:They planned that so hard they built 3 giant battlecruisers to support it. Fisher and Churchill are, like, the dream team of "No seriously guys, I have a great idea!" I think you mean large light cruisers... 
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Sep 2, 2016 16:20
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spectralent posted:If Soldaten is anything to go by, a lot of the Luftwaffe were loving nutters. Pretty sure that was a gunner. It wasn't uncommon to fly low and strafe civilians or military targets. It didn't matter, it cluttered up the roads and delayed traffic/transportation. 
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Sep 2, 2016 16:21
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Pretty sure that was a gunner. It wasn't uncommon to fly low and strafe civilians or military targets. It didn't matter, it cluttered up the roads and delayed traffic/transportation. Yeah, throughout the Luftwaffe's bit of Soldaten you get the impression that, far from lacking capability, the separation of the airmen from their victims by the machinery they were commanding allowed them to utterly dehumanise their "prey" and see their terror and deaths as part of a big game. There is almost no distinction between military and civillian targets; indeed, at one point one of the airmen jokingly interrogates another as to whether or not he restricted his violence to military targets, which they both consider hilarious. Hell, there's one guy who talks about how much he loves bombing civilians, saying that when he was shot down his only regret was that he hadn't been able to drop more bombs on the people fleeing from the town centre. I find a clean Luftwaffe very hard to believe.
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Sep 2, 2016 16:37
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That doesn't sound significantly different from any of the other WWII air forces, though. Most of that is par for the course.
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Sep 2, 2016 16:49
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Sure, but I find it pretty hard to believe the Luftwaffe's not got a load of blood on it's hands all the same. Also, thinking about it, there's also the Fallschirmjaeger groups, who were involved in war crimes. There's the massacre in Crete, and the killing of civilians in Holland, off the top of my head. If the Luftwaffe have any less blood on their hands than the other wings of Nazi Germany, it's going to be because there were less of them to go around rather than any higher moral character/"clean"ness. EDIT: Googling "Luftwaffe war crimes" is bringing up a ton of stuff, basically as I expected, but I don't really have the stomach to go through it all right now, apologies
spectralent fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Sep 2, 2016 |
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Sep 2, 2016 17:05
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spectralent posted:Yeah, throughout the Luftwaffe's bit of Soldaten you get the impression that, far from lacking capability, the separation of the airmen from their victims by the machinery they were commanding allowed them to utterly dehumanise their "prey" and see their terror and deaths as part of a big game. There is almost no distinction between military and civillian targets; indeed, at one point one of the airmen jokingly interrogates another as to whether or not he restricted his violence to military targets, which they both consider hilarious. Hell, there's one guy who talks about how much he loves bombing civilians, saying that when he was shot down his only regret was that he hadn't been able to drop more bombs on the people fleeing from the town centre. I find a clean Luftwaffe very hard to believe. Its probably perceived as "cleaner" because bombing cities was seen as the norm after a while, and, from what I've read, you mostly get the civilian strafing stuff from the first 2 years when the Germans were invading other countries. Its still lovely though. On the interesting side, with added morbidity... mordibness? Whatever. The newest He-111's at the time of the invasion of Poland had (or could have) a 20mm MG FF cannon in the nose which they preferred to use in the ground attack role... Oh, and they also dropped cluster munitions on roads in the form of the SD-2 "Butterfly" Bombs.
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Sep 2, 2016 17:08
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Depending on how you want to interpret the Hague 4 (Bombardment), just about every air force ever has been guilty of warcrimes, at least in the failure to give sufficient notice of bombing areas where civilians are. However strict you feel like being about the Hague, it does specify that it's a crime to bomb undefended towns - participation in the Guernica and Durango attacks breaches this. The Luftwaffe were an organisation carrying out warcrimes from about a year after it's formation.
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Sep 2, 2016 17:10
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Its probably perceived as "cleaner" because bombing cities was seen as the norm after a while, and, from what I've read, you mostly get the civilian strafing stuff from the first 2 years when the Germans were invading other countries. lovely as it was the Luftwaffe was far from alone in just strafing roads, a not insignificant amount of bailed out allied pilots were lynched by enraged german civillians, typically condoned or actively instigated by the local nazi officials, this was in a large part because of the fighter pilots who would fly low and strafe the roads of Germany (also because of the massive bombing of the cities). Air forces were generally equally dirty as far as i know in terms of actually fighting (ignoring the luftwaffe ground forces), the only difference was in capability allowing many to kill far more, if an allied airman was found by the Luftwaffe or the Wehrmacht he was usually ok, if he was found by the Volksturm or committed members of the Nazi party he was very often in trouble, theres a quote from an American bomber crew who were shot down: "Nobody tried very hard to do us harm… they just seemed to stare at us and we at them. The strangest odyssey began next morning, when we began to walk out of Gravensberg down the main street. We walked down the middle of the street, and the civilians on the sidewalk hurled epithets and threats at us, ‘Kaput machen!’, again and again – a frightening litany. We passed a group of nuns, and even they spat at us. We learned later that they really hated the fighter pilots because they came down and shot up anything that moved on the roads and even farm animals in the fields. Our fighter pilots generated a lot of anger and distress, and if they were shot down they were in great jeopardy – the civilians would gang up and beat them mercilessly"
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Sep 2, 2016 17:20
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Nenonen posted:Actually German navy used several types of 88mm and 105mm guns in WW1, which is where the FlaK 18/36 inherited the caliber. Speaking of inherited calibers and long-term usage of standard shell diameters, what was the reason (if anything cohesive as far as mil-reasoning goes) for the US sticking with ~3in (incl. 75 and 76mm) shells for so long? I can't imagine they were just using the same tooling (or drat near anything for that matter) for 75 years but did they do something like an ergonomic study and realize that 3" was about as big as you could make a shell before it started getting too big for the average crewman's hand? They were firing 3" shells in the ACW, and 75/76mm cannons were going on Shermans through WWII, not to mention field guns in that size throughout that whole time being fielded by tons of armies. Certainly pre-NATO there wasn't much standardization of breech and barrel specifications so it couldn't have been to share anything between, say, French and Russian field guns.
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Sep 2, 2016 17:21
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spectralent posted:Sure, but I find it pretty hard to believe the Luftwaffe's not got a load of blood on it's hands all the same. Sure, Fallschirmjaeger were certainly not clean - but the fact that they count as Luftwaffe is due to organization, not role. When people talk about a "clean" Luftwaffe, they aren't referring to the Airlanding divisions or the Luftwaffe armored division. If you consider the people flying the planes, and you leave out ground forces, the Luftwaffe is not really demonstrably dirtier than any other major power air force. You could make an argument that a lot of really bad human research was to support the Luftwaffe, though.
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Sep 2, 2016 17:29
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FAUXTON posted:Speaking of inherited calibers and long-term usage of standard shell diameters, what was the reason (if anything cohesive as far as mil-reasoning goes) for the US sticking with ~3in (incl. 75 and 76mm) shells for so long? I can't imagine they were just using the same tooling (or drat near anything for that matter) for 75 years but did they do something like an ergonomic study and realize that 3" was about as big as you could make a shell before it started getting too big for the average crewman's hand? Might be, but gun weight and mobility is also a factor especially back when horses did all the hauling. Maybe they noticed that anything bigger than 3 inches started getting too wieldy? But you're slightly mistaken about there being no standardization before NATO - the US and UK employed Canon de 75 modèle 1897 in large numbers, and the WW2 75mm tank guns used the same ammo all the way to M24 Chaffee. So it's not just a mere coincidence!
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Sep 2, 2016 17:30
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Polyakov posted:lovely as it was the Luftwaffe was far from alone in just strafing roads, a not insignificant amount of bailed out allied pilots were lynched by enraged german civillians, typically condoned or actively instigated by the local nazi officials, this was in a large part because of the fighter pilots who would fly low and strafe the roads of Germany (also because of the massive bombing of the cities). Air forces were generally equally dirty as far as i know in terms of actually fighting (ignoring the luftwaffe ground forces), the only difference was in capability allowing many to kill far more, if an allied airman was found by the Luftwaffe or the Wehrmacht he was usually ok, if he was found by the Volksturm or committed members of the Nazi party he was very often in trouble, theres a quote from an American bomber crew who were shot down: When you say "strafing roads".. it sounds like you mean civilians on the roads? Not just the infrastructure? Horrible as terror bombing is at least there's some plausible deniability. Actively targeting civilians and cars (presumably with people in them) and stuff seems like it's on a whole different level. I can't say I can blame the civilians for their reaction to captured pilots if that's actually the case.
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Sep 2, 2016 17:31
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Koramei posted:When you say "strafing roads".. it sounds like you mean civilians on the roads? Not just the infrastructure? There's a bit in Slaughterhouse-Five IIRC where Vonnegut reminisces about getting strafed by allied fighters while being marched away from the ruins of Dresden. War is hell.
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Sep 2, 2016 17:36
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Polyakov posted:lovely as it was the Luftwaffe was far from alone in just strafing roads, a not insignificant amount of bailed out allied pilots were lynched by enraged german civillians, typically condoned or actively instigated by the local nazi officials, this was in a large part because of the fighter pilots who would fly low and strafe the roads of Germany (also because of the massive bombing of the cities). Air forces were generally equally dirty as far as i know in terms of actually fighting (ignoring the luftwaffe ground forces), the only difference was in capability allowing many to kill far more, if an allied airman was found by the Luftwaffe or the Wehrmacht he was usually ok, if he was found by the Volksturm or committed members of the Nazi party he was very often in trouble, theres a quote from an American bomber crew who were shot down: War is lovely, people are lovely, people fighting during a war are the shittiest. FAUXTON posted:Speaking of inherited calibers and long-term usage of standard shell diameters, what was the reason (if anything cohesive as far as mil-reasoning goes) for the US sticking with ~3in (incl. 75 and 76mm) shells for so long? I can't imagine they were just using the same tooling (or drat near anything for that matter) for 75 years but did they do something like an ergonomic study and realize that 3" was about as big as you could make a shell before it started getting too big for the average crewman's hand? Diameter isn't everything. Just look at the length of a complete round from the civil war era compared to a complete round from an M4. 90 mm is still only 3.5 inches and those were being loaded perfectly fine by crew(member)s. You're not grabbing the shell by the neck, you're cradling/sliding it into the breach. The tooling would've changed a lot, because the various guns would've had compensators or added elevation/sight controls, different actions, and so on.
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Sep 2, 2016 17:36
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FAUXTON posted:Speaking of inherited calibers and long-term usage of standard shell diameters, what was the reason (if anything cohesive as far as mil-reasoning goes) for the US sticking with ~3in (incl. 75 and 76mm) shells for so long? I can't imagine they were just using the same tooling (or drat near anything for that matter) for 75 years but did they do something like an ergonomic study and realize that 3" was about as big as you could make a shell before it started getting too big for the average crewman's hand? Actually that's how you got metric 75mm shells being used in the US at the same time as 3 inch shells labeled in metric (76.2mm). The US built their early 75mm tank guns to use howitzer shells designed for the French 1897 75. The various inch marks seem to have been pretty convenient brackets for guns so they got used out of convenience. You see 75mm and 50 mm guns showing up elsewhere although only the USSR seemed to have consistently done 100mm over 105 (except for the new hotness naval dual purpose guns in Japan)
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Sep 2, 2016 17:38
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Polyakov posted:lovely as it was the Luftwaffe was far from alone in just strafing roads, a not insignificant amount of bailed out allied pilots were lynched by enraged german civillians, typically condoned or actively instigated by the local nazi officials, this was in a large part because of the fighter pilots who would fly low and strafe the roads of Germany (also because of the massive bombing of the cities). Air forces were generally equally dirty as far as i know in terms of actually fighting (ignoring the luftwaffe ground forces), the only difference was in capability allowing many to kill far more, if an allied airman was found by the Luftwaffe or the Wehrmacht he was usually ok, if he was found by the Volksturm or committed members of the Nazi party he was very often in trouble, theres a quote from an American bomber crew who were shot down: I met Harold Brown, a Tuskegee Airman, who was shot down over a small German town. A lynch mob had already assembled to hang him, but his life was saved by an officer (I assume Wehrmacht or police) who dispersed the crowd at gunpoint, then escorted him to a POW camp. I asked him about his treatment in the POW being a black man and he said it didn't matter, all POW's were treated the same by the Germans who referred them as cockroaches. -edit- Found a youtube video in which he goes more in depth on the story he told me. If you skip to minute 6 he talks about how angry the civilians were because he was strafing and blew up a train, and who knows, maybe he hit this guy's wife or his baby ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ the story seems more dramatic than he told me, he and the guy had to barricade themselves inside a pub to fend off the lynch mob. That's how much they hated fighter pilots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRLS1bK-a50 Animal fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Sep 2, 2016 |
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Sep 2, 2016 17:39
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Koramei posted:When you say "strafing roads".. it sounds like you mean civilians on the roads? Not just the infrastructure? Strafing generally implies using your guns, rather than bombs. .50 cal machine guns might pack a punch but they won't do much to a dirt/paved road.
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Sep 2, 2016 17:39
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I recall reading that, in an effort to ensure his own shot down pilots were treated adequately, Goering was very insistent on enemy pilots being treated according to the rules of PoWs, and at least once got rip poo poo pissed that some Allied pilots had been sent to the wrong camp, which they likely wouldn't have made it out of. Don't remember the source though so it could be total bollocks, but an effort to treat each other's PoWs properly could well factor into the notion of a 'clean' (or at least not more lovely than the norm) Luftwaffe.
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Sep 2, 2016 17:59
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Koramei posted:When you say "strafing roads".. it sounds like you mean civilians on the roads? Not just the infrastructure? I do mean that, its what i take from the quote in question and others, there was probably very little distinction in the thought of a fighter bomber between a horse and cart pulling ammunition and a horse and cart pulling food, they both got shot up all the same.
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Sep 2, 2016 18:03
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xthetenth posted:Actually that's how you got metric 75mm shells being used in the US at the same time as 3 inch shells labeled in metric (76.2mm). The US built their early 75mm tank guns to use howitzer shells designed for the French 1897 75. The USSR used the 107 mm caliber in infantry (4.2 inches) since they inherited it from the Tsarists. Until the D-10, 100 mm was a navy caliber.
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Sep 2, 2016 18:04
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Sure, Fallschirmjaeger were certainly not clean - but the fact that they count as Luftwaffe is due to organization, not role. When people talk about a "clean" Luftwaffe, they aren't referring to the Airlanding divisions or the Luftwaffe armored division. Yeah, but I don't think you can really play the "other guys were doing it too" card. The Luftwaffe were also guilty of targeting civilians to an unnecessary extent, and by that extent aren't really "Clean", so much as a lot of airforces were "dirty".
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Sep 2, 2016 18:06
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spectralent posted:I find a clean Luftwaffe very hard to believe. I'm a little hesitant to respond as it seems like you kind of have some sort of axe to grind here, but just to be clear, I offered this in terms of comparison to the rest of the Werhmacht and to the Allied air forces. No one is suggesting they didn't do loads of repugnant stuff (or at least I'm not).
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Sep 2, 2016 18:10
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bewbies posted:it seems like you kind of have some sort of axe to grind here
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Sep 2, 2016 18:11
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spectralent posted:Yeah, but I don't think you can really play the "other guys were doing it too" card. The Luftwaffe were also guilty of targeting civilians to an unnecessary extent, and by that extent aren't really "Clean", so much as a lot of airforces were "dirty". War is fundamentally a business of doing bad poo poo to other people. Nothing you are saying refutes the idea that a "Clean Luftwaffe" existed - the fundamental point of the "clean X" theory is that relative to other forces the force in question is not appreciably worse. "The other guys were doing it too" is the whole point. "Clean" in the context of "Clean Wehrmacht" or "Clean Luftwaffe" is a relative term based on the concept that they did not actively commit atrocities in the way that the SS did. Sure, they did things that were awful, and violated the rules of war, but no more so than their opponents. The "Clean Wehrmacht" is pretty much conclusively bullshit; the "Clean Luftwaffe" argument seems to have some degree of merit. I'm not saying that the Luftwaffe was some Paragon of Teutonic Knightly Virtue (sup Hermann), just that it was an armed service that behaved much like any other - unlike the SS, significant parts of the Wehrmacht, the IJA, the NKVD, etc.
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Sep 2, 2016 18:16
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