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Owlkill posted:This is a fantastic story that I'm going to steal as an interesting historical anecdote, but what was the point of this? Just to get the Germans to waste resources on rescue missions etc and also act as a trap for the local agents? Seems like a way easier way of destroying/capturing enemy equipment and personnel than the normal way (fighting)
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Sep 19, 2016 10:00
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cheerfullydrab posted:My favorite story is how the Soviets created a fictional Wehrmacht unit trapped behind enemy lines but heroically fighting on, a war story that all human beings find universally compelling, by making prisoners make false radio broadcasts. Reich authorities sent endless commandos to link up with and assist these people, airlifted them tons of supplies, and tried to send local agents to make contact with them. They came up with plan after plan to get their brave soldiers back but somehow something always got messed up. One air rescue operation was so daring the Soviets even staged a fake firefight to keep the planes from landing. The Soviets set up a fake camp to receive commandos who they then added to the cast of the play, forcing them to make false radio reports about their "successful" missions to headquarters. The Germans gave the supposed commander of this unit, who was an actual respected officer, promotions and a medal! The whole thing went on for almost a year even as the Soviet armies moved further and further west and was only terminated by the end of the war. Holy poo poo. Is there any info I can use to track this more specifically? I have to read this. Owlkill posted:This is a fantastic story that I'm going to steal as an interesting historical anecdote, but what was the point of this? Just to get the Germans to waste resources on rescue missions etc and also act as a trap for the local agents? They're wasting manpower on relief efforts that could be used for other things, wasting local intelligence agents and exposing local partisans, and dropping them free supplies, in return for amusing some officers of POW camps.
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Sep 19, 2016 10:02
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Yvonmukluk posted:Well, I recommend you pick up Smesler & Davies' the Myth of the Eastern Front, it's a very good overview of that sort of thing. I think that part of the reason it permeated is that, other than Lost Causers, the history of the Eastern Front was written by the losers. Do you have PMs? I could maybe track down a copy of my dissertation and send it to you if it might be helpful, but it's an undergrad one, so probably a bit remedial. I do have PMs and would still enjoy reading it. I will also look into the myths book because that sounds like it was made for me. I'll also look into the Glantz intel book.
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Sep 19, 2016 10:23
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That anecdote I told was not from the Glantz book, just so everybody knows. I was just trying to illustrate how awesome Soviet intelligence was during WW2. Also, I didn't provide a link to a wikipedia article because I couldn't remember the specific name of the operation. However, I did find it out in a series of steps that shows what a wonderful resource the internet can be. I remembered that one of the Soviets involved got caught in the US and that story was made into a Tom Hanks movie last year. So, to Tom Hanks' wikipedia page I went, which lead me to the article for Rudolf Abel, which lead me to it. This sort of connection would have been extremely difficult to make not that long ago. It's not the best article, but it's all there, including some very interesting stuff I hadn't mentioned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Scherhorn Also how terrible is it that the Soviets called it Operation Berezino and Western sources just arbitrarily decided it was called Operation Scherhorn? Another August Storm/Long Lance situation. edit: I was wrong on at least one point. They only gave Scherhorn ONE promotion. I like how he refused his Knight's Cross after the war. Teriyaki Hairpiece fucked around with this message at 10:59 on Sep 19, 2016 |
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Sep 19, 2016 10:55
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Here's a good book source I found with cursory googling. https://books.google.com/books?id=B...erezino&f=false
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Sep 19, 2016 11:06
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spectralent posted:A fun fact you may not know and will hopefully not derail the thread: I've read that while true, there's more to it than that. The intention was to have it translated and delivered right before the planned time of the attack on Pearl Harbor. In short, Japan would've still got their perfect surprise attack while being able to sneer and say they had declared war ahead of time, as was appropriate.
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Sep 19, 2016 11:08
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spectralent posted:They're wasting manpower on relief efforts that could be used for other things, wasting local intelligence agents and exposing local partisans, and dropping them free supplies, in return for amusing some officers of POW camps.
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Sep 19, 2016 11:36
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Chump Farts posted:
There is quite a bit of material available online. Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archive Heroism of the People Memory of the People Electronic Archive of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany Documents of the Soviet Epoch German Documents in Russia Naturally it's all in Russian (or in the latter case, German).
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Sep 19, 2016 16:48
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HEY GAL posted:also if English intelligence can teach us anything, it's that the dudes who went into intelligence during that war were loving mental. in the good way. Some in a bad way. Geoffrey Barraclough, for example, was a medievalist/Germanist who helped pick bombing targets during the war and who totally lost his mind after helping to destroy the places that he loved. Wrote some pretty interesting books after that though.
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Sep 19, 2016 18:48
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Disinterested posted:Some in a bad way. Geoffrey Barraclough, for example, was a medievalist/Germanist who helped pick bombing targets during the war and who totally lost his mind after helping to destroy the places that he loved. Wrote some pretty interesting books after that though. I probably have somewhere between 12 and 15 intelligence officer biographies from the Second World War, I find them fascinating - and the range of them even more so. Barraclough did some absolutely excellent histories - did he ever do a biography of his time in the service? If anyone is looking for a recommendation, British intelligence memoirs fall into two camps. There's the boys own adventure, like Wharton-Tigar (or better, women's own adventure, like Daphne Fry Knox), and then there's the slightly absent minded anthropologist memoirs of the men who went to intelligence thinking it would all be spy vs spy and found out the majority of it was police work and interpreting. They're, if anything, better - better reads, better fun, absolutely hilarious and absent the bravado of the "and then i did the business with the piano wire" set. Norman Lewis' "Naples '44" stands out to me as one of the best, and definitely the funniest of all that I've read, especially on the selection process: quote:What the trainee did not realise was that however encouraging the report on the major's desk, or promising the dialogue that ensued, his fate had been instantly settled on from the moment of the officer's first quick scrutiny of his face The Selection officer believed that blue was the colour of truth. To the blue eyed trainees therefore went the responsible, dangerous and sometimes glamorous jobs, while the rest were tipped into the dustbin of what was then called the Field Security Police. In this they were confronted with the drudgery of delivering army-style pay-attention-you-fuckers lectures, of snooping, detested by all, in the vicinity of military installations in the hope of pouncing on unwatchful guards, or discovering significant scraps of paper not properly disposed of by burning, and making up alarming rumours with which to fill in the emptiness of the weekly report...
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Sep 19, 2016 19:53
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lots of the bataan death march dudes came from the state i grew up in, because some dude thought that New Mexicans and Philipinos were more or less the same people, being short, brown, and Hispanic, so they sent them all there
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Sep 19, 2016 20:19
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cheerfullydrab posted:My favorite story is how the Soviets created a fictional Wehrmacht unit trapped behind enemy lines but heroically fighting on, a war story that all human beings find universally compelling, by making prisoners make false radio broadcasts. Reich authorities sent endless commandos to link up with and assist these people, airlifted them tons of supplies, and tried to send local agents to make contact with them. They came up with plan after plan to get their brave soldiers back but somehow something always got messed up. One air rescue operation was so daring the Soviets even staged a fake firefight to keep the planes from landing. The Soviets set up a fake camp to receive commandos who they then added to the cast of the play, forcing them to make false radio reports about their "successful" missions to headquarters. The Germans gave the supposed commander of this unit, who was an actual respected officer, promotions and a medal! The whole thing went on for almost a year even as the Soviet armies moved further and further west and was only terminated by the end of the war. That and the guy who made whole allied armies out nothing but ballons and tarps, I loving love this stuff with the 2nd World War. Who doesn't like a good ruse?
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Sep 19, 2016 20:55
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lenoon posted:I probably have somewhere between 12 and 15 intelligence officer biographies from the Second World War, I find them fascinating - and the range of them even more so. Barraclough did some absolutely excellent histories - did he ever do a biography of his time in the service? Not insofar as I can tell. The only obit I can find doesn't even mention it, I just gather it from what old colleagues at All Souls and other medievalists told me.
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Sep 19, 2016 21:02
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Is there any kind of constant answer to "how do you defeat an insurgency"? Obviously it's tough and expensive, but what has (even distantly historically) done the trick?
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Sep 19, 2016 21:11
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americong posted:Is there any kind of constant answer to "how do you defeat an insurgency"? genocide
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Sep 19, 2016 21:11
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WoodrowSkillson posted:genocide Also an answer to the question 'how do you start an insurgency?'
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Sep 19, 2016 21:14
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americong posted:Is there any kind of constant answer to "how do you defeat an insurgency"? Long term occupation and complete assimilation into the occupying nation. Basically completely impractical for non-contiguous territories.
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Sep 19, 2016 21:17
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OwlFancier posted:Long term occupation and complete assimilation into the occupying nation. is it reasonable to say that colonial-era or post-WW2 style remote occupation is very expectedly going to require brutality or be a failure
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Sep 19, 2016 21:20
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Making the guys you're occupying actually like you helps, generally meaning meaningfully improving their lives.
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Sep 19, 2016 21:21
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americong posted:is it reasonable to say that colonial-era or post-WW2 style remote occupation is very expectedly going to require brutality or be a failure Or reforms that would make it no longer recognizable as such.
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Sep 19, 2016 21:24
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americong posted:Is there any kind of constant answer to "how do you defeat an insurgency"? The wikipedia article on counter-insurgency is extensive, and references the main successful examples, including the Philippine-American War and the Malay Emergency. Lots of theory there. As a social science, there is likely to never be a concrete answer, but the generally supported options are "make the insurgents less popular than you", or "deploy an overwhelming number of troops and police such that the insurgents have no room to operate"; the second option may or may not involve genocide. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Sep 19, 2016 |
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Sep 19, 2016 21:28
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Part of it's probably also establishing goals. Like, if your goal is to just establish a government and leave them to it you might be able to co-opt some of your insurgents. If you want something you might not be able to get it on your terms. If you have no goal then you're pretty much doomed to fail.
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Sep 19, 2016 21:34
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Same if you're trying to do it on the cheap in the face of domestic political uncertainty.
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Sep 19, 2016 21:35
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Much like the earlier question regarding defeating an enemy, there is no absolute answer nor should we expect there to be one. War is probably the most complex human endeavor; there is no perfect formula, no secret blueprint. There are too many variables and unknowns
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Sep 19, 2016 21:38
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PittTheElder posted:Same if you're trying to do it on the cheap in the face of domestic political uncertainty. Oh, yeah. The understanding that it's a war, and is a full endeavour from start to end, is pretty much essential, and I don't think that's been true of any modern western occupations. Maybe one of the french african ones I've forgotten?
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Sep 19, 2016 21:40
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americong posted:Is there any kind of constant answer to "how do you defeat an insurgency"? Insurgencies get beat all the loving time, usually without making international news. Plenty of situations where you have a dozen guys in the mountains with AKs who never get any traction and turn themselves in a decade later. Once it hits that tipping point into a capital I Insurgency you're deep into tough and expensive territory. China eventually put down the rural White Lotus rebellion using the baojia system, in which villagers were organized decimally and registered into groups of one thousand families who were held collectively responsible for their member's transgressions. They'd also require people to live only in fortified villages, which was really less about defense and more about keeping them all together where they could be easily monitored. Something along these lines would eventually be put in place against the Nian. Purely military solutions were extraordinarily expensive and produced only temporary results. The state had to take an active role in civil society to keep people from joining the insurgency, both through addressing poverty and famine and relying on social control measures like baojia. Alternately for less important places like Guizhou you could just let a decade of continual war and famine kill off civil society completely before finally sending in the army to reign over the ashes.
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Sep 19, 2016 21:49
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americong posted:Is there any kind of constant answer to "how do you defeat an insurgency"? I'll note that in addition to the 'military' solutions, a fairly large number of insurgencies have been ended or even prevented by a decent negotiated settlement.
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Sep 19, 2016 22:21
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loving bribe them not to fight you
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Sep 19, 2016 22:23
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The only way of defeating an insurgency that seems to have worked in the past is making peace with the political arm of the insurgents, I guess either that or the Tamil Tigers option.
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Sep 19, 2016 22:35
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HEY GAL posted:loving bribe them not to fight you This was sort of done in Iraq during the Bush years.
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Sep 19, 2016 22:36
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Plan Z posted:This was sort of done in Iraq during the Bush years. It's what will almost certainly end up happening with some branches of ISIL too.
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Sep 19, 2016 22:37
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Do bribes work or do you just have insurgents with even more cash to spend on rpgs and toyota pickup trucks?
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Sep 19, 2016 22:49
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Boiled Water posted:Do bribes work or do you just have insurgents with even more cash to spend on rpgs and toyota pickup trucks? Depends on how you define "bribe." If it's just throwing cash at the top dudes you're probably going to end up with something like the endemic kidnapping, drugs, and extortion for profit that Columbia's been dealing with for the past 40+ years. If "bribe" means hand the big guys a few bills to calm them the gently caress down for a bit and then dump a few million into building schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure that actually create a functioning state in the area than it works wonders. Successful insurgencies are successful because the government is profoundly loving up providing the basic services of a government. All the really successful ones you read about have a point where they get wildly popular because they start providing the services that the government won't or can't. Usually it starts with basic security, but schools and hospitals are pretty commonly seen as well.
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Sep 19, 2016 23:46
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Hasn't Colombia more or less gotten FARC to sign a peace deal?
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Sep 19, 2016 23:56
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OwlFancier posted:I don't entirely know either, wikipedia isn't very clear which model it's talking about at any given time and the source it links to doesn't work. Maybe you were thinking of the motor for the traverse on early T-34's would short out and start a fire?
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Sep 20, 2016 00:11
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StashAugustine posted:Hasn't Colombia more or less gotten FARC to sign a peace deal? Yeah. Check out how long it took them, and what tactics they used to finally undercut support for them.
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Sep 20, 2016 00:22
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OwlFancier posted:It does seem to have a weird "this tank was hugely successful but here's this massive list of reasons why it was poo poo" kind of bent to it. T-34 tank production numbers for WW2 57,000+ T-34 tanks produced of all types/variants. 44,900 T-34 tanks lost (Total loss/irrecoverable) Russia lost as many T-34's as Germany did for all tanks and assault guns, combined.
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Sep 20, 2016 00:31
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That doesn't mean the tank was poo poo though?
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Sep 20, 2016 00:37
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Splode posted:That doesn't mean the tank was poo poo though? Lol.
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Sep 20, 2016 00:53
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Cyrano4747 posted:Yeah. Check out how long it took them, and what tactics they used to finally undercut support for them. Not saying it wasn't a massive effort. Do you or anyone have any particular knowledge about the war? I picked up a little from playing Andean Abyss.
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Sep 20, 2016 00:58
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