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reminder that cheerfullydrab is the guy that thinks it's bad the US got involved in WW2
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Sep 23, 2016 14:00
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| # ? May 10, 2024 03:36 |
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You all allowed yourselves to be overcome by gay black hitler what ifs by merely acknowledging the existence of d&d
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Sep 23, 2016 14:05
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what if d&d was good
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Sep 23, 2016 14:07
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Koramei posted:reminder that cheerfullydrab is the guy that thinks it's bad the US got involved in WW2 I'm not all bad.
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Sep 23, 2016 14:10
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Not sure if this has already been asked, but here goes: What's the single most lopsided naval battle on record? I'm talking along the lines of XX ships sunk on one side vs 0 on the other. Same question applies to land/air battles.
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Sep 23, 2016 14:13
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Surigao Strait?
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Sep 23, 2016 14:16
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JcDent posted:what if d&d was good Impossible.
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Sep 23, 2016 14:16
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Fangz posted:Surigao Strait? Or Manila Bay. We're there any US casualties at Surigao Strait?
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Sep 23, 2016 14:21
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anakha posted:Not sure if this has already been asked, but here goes: The most lopsided battle of the ACW was the Battle of Harpers Ferry. Confederate losses: code:code:Teriyaki Hairpiece fucked around with this message at 14:23 on Sep 23, 2016 |
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Sep 23, 2016 14:21
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Why not Tsushima?
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Sep 23, 2016 14:21
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anakha posted:Not sure if this has already been asked, but here goes: 1904 Dogger Bank incident because its outcome was such British "no sir, gently caress you" and achieved the strategic effect of taking an entire fleet out of action for long enough to drat near decide the war.
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Sep 23, 2016 14:21
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anakha posted:Not sure if this has already been asked, but here goes: I'll go a bit further back in time and offer this: Battle of Myeongnyang 13 Korean ships vs at least 120 Japanese. 0 Korean ships lost compared to at least 30 Japanese.
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Sep 23, 2016 14:26
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The First SIno-Japanese War was a pretty lopsided conflict all in all, and the Battle of the Yalu River pretty much destroyed the Chinese navy as an effective fighting force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Yalu_River_(1894)
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Sep 23, 2016 14:31
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Teleological is one of those words that I find gets overused a lot by historians trying to prove that older works they disagree with Are Actually Bad. Then again maybe it's because it's so often used to discredit Arthur Marder by people who, during the course of my doctoral research, kept being proved broadly wrong and Marder broadly right. My favourite thing about history is that I've always found people who dismiss accusations of teleology end up succumbing to it, and it's used as a defence of poor history - and archaeology for that matter, just look at my shambles of a doctorate where I do both sometimes within the same paragraph as if by magic. Academia eh? Presumably you're talking about the September programme which was eerily similar to Versailles (turns out everyone in ww1 was a land grabbing shortsighted bastard, what what), and a consultation on possibilities should the Franco Prussian war repeat itself. Who knows - perhaps even impossible to know - if that would be even vaguely similar to a German victors peace, but victors peace settlements tend to be rather lovely.
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Sep 23, 2016 14:37
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lenoon posted:I don't know much about wheat imports, but wouldn't blockading Britain from food imports over the Atlantic be of only limited effect unless we're talking about the US allying with France, Germany or Russia in this hypothetical war? Interdicting imports from Canada sounds all very well and good but when you could literally have people swimming across the channel with a bag full of baguettes it seems to be a marginal victory. By the early 20th century the major exporting countries are the USA, Russia, and Canada (more or less in that order), with Argentina, Australia, and India in the second tier. France and Germany are both importing food rather than exporting it, though not to the same extreme extent as Britain. They will not be supplying Britain, they will be bidding against her. feedmegin posted:The UK wants grain to get from the US to Europe, it's not going to try and stop it. Okay, think on this for about a second. From the 1860s onward US military strength is too high relative to Britain's sealift capacity to send and supply troops across the Atlantic, meaning a land invasion or even a defense of Canada is impracticable. There are marginal areas that are difficult to get to from America and Britain can probably hold them indefinitely. For example, at that time Nova Scotia has limited overland communications with the rest of the continent and is accessible only by an isthmus with notably rough terrain. Newfoundland, Labrador, and Prince Edward Island are all practically accessible only by sea. But the bulk of British possessions and dependencies near the USA are indefensible against a determined American attack and will just have to be conceded. Consequently, Britain's only means of actually hurting the United States is economic warfare through commerce raiding and blockade. It isn't feasible to detain, board, and inspect every US- or neutral-flagged ship going to and from North America to ensure they're carrying only foodstuffs. Even if they could, the USA would see what they were doing and cease trading. Allowing the USA to freely trade in grain with neutral nations makes the blockade in general obviously untenable. It amounts to a concession that American grain exports are too important to Britain for them to actually fight the USA, at which point they might as well sue for peace. feedmegin posted:Um. If a US wheat embargo has that much of an effect on the entire industrialised world in anything but the shortest of terms (either directly or because Britain is spending a tonne of money to buy it all from other sources), then what happens instead is that the entirety of Europe forms an alliance and pushes America's poo poo in (while also improving its agricultural practices by state mandate so that can't happen again). This is pure fantasy for two reasons, some of which I outlined above. First, Britain has by far the greatest capacity of any nation in the world to mount such an overseas invasion, with France coming in a very distant second place. No other European power has the ability to make more than a token contribution. Total European military strength massively exceeds the USA's, but the proportion of it that is actually deployable to the North American theater is minuscule in comparison to the force that the USA would be able to devote to its defense from at least the 1860s onward. The war will have to be prosecuted at sea, meaning they are limited to embargo, blockade, and conceivably terror attacks on civilian targets (e.g. naval bombardment of New York City) although those weren't popular at the time and would probably be of limited usefulness due to American defensive sorties and defensive sea mines. Second, and in consequence of the first reason, Britain is the power that will be responsible for the grain shortages, because as I explained above their only means of harming the USA is through blockade. The USA has no particular reason to make a move towards embargoing Europe, because they can beat Britain locally by occupying the best 90% of Canada and waiting for them to make an offer for peace. At that point the onus is on Britain to do anything at all, and blockade is the only practical option. Consequently, if other European countries are made to suffer by the war, it will be Britain's fault for initiating the blockade and bidding up the price of Russian and Argentine grain. Alternative, Britain could choose not to pursue a blockade, but that amounts to not seriously attempting to fight. In line with that, the most realistic scenario would be a limited war in which there is no significant blockade of the USA and certainly no embargo of Europe, in which the USA occupies Canada, while the Royal Navy confines the US Navy to port and mounts operations against US overseas targets. However, since these are mostly in the Pacific there is limited available strength and it will probably not amount to more than nuisances like the seizure of coaling stations and raids on harder targets like Hawaii and the Philippines. The final result would probably be a negotiated peace to the USA's advantage, though not severely so. However, the hypothetical seemed to be asking about the outcome of a (much less likely) total war, so I tried to answer that. quote:The end result of this is not 'everyone in Britain starves to death' over any timescale, or anything close to it. On that we agree, we just seem to quibbling about how painful shortages would be for Britain and over what timescale. Polyakov posted:See my earlier posts about food production but Britain also had a lot of slack capacity that it was choosing not to employ because it wasnt economic to do so. This capacity is helpful but insufficient to Britain's food needs; it was a useful supplement during WWI but only in conjunction with continuing massive importation from the United States and Canada in spite of the submarine warfare.
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Sep 23, 2016 15:05
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TheFluff posted:A while back y'all were discussing tank crew assignments. Way too late to that party but figured this might be mildly interesting anyway: Oh look, identical height requirements to Soviet armour, and yet for some reason it has a reputation of being manned by dwarves. Astrov's tanks (T-60, T-70) could take even taller men, since Astrov was tall himself.
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Sep 23, 2016 15:06
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Well, what about the height requirement for Centurion, M48/M60, the Chieftain, Leopards and whatever zooming deathtraps the French were building? Heck, skip the French and Germans, people care about them as much as they care about Sweden when it comes to discussing Cold War tonks. Then we can see if the stereotype has merit.
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Sep 23, 2016 15:11
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lenoon posted:My favourite thing about history is that I've always found people who dismiss accusations of teleology end up succumbing to it, and it's used as a defence of poor history - and archaeology for that matter, just look at my shambles of a doctorate where I do both sometimes within the same paragraph as if by magic. Academia eh? Oh good Lord yes. Unless this is meant as a swipe at me for taking a swipe at someone else, although I can't honestly imagine that it is. quote:Presumably you're talking about the September programme which was eerily similar to Versailles (turns out everyone in ww1 was a land grabbing shortsighted bastard, what what), and a consultation on possibilities should the Franco Prussian war repeat itself. Who knows - perhaps even impossible to know - if that would be even vaguely similar to a German victors peace, but victors peace settlements tend to be rather lovely. Yeah, the September program is what I meant. I forgot the name and my poorly-lit house was too dark for me to me to read anything on the bookshelves and anyway it was five in the morning and I haven't had my coffee yet. It was never official German policy but since the whole discussion of a Central Powers victory in WW1 is Gay Black Hitler anyway, IMO it's as good evidence of German intention for a peace treaty as anything else. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Sep 23, 2016 |
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Sep 23, 2016 15:33
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Libluini posted:That's interesting, I've heard Chamberlain was against war because he didn't want to start something like WWI again, which would be the opposite of arguing "Britain was just not ready for war yet". Can someone say what Chamberlain was really thinking? Chamberlain immediately ordered a ramping up of military production following his "peace in our time" speech, because he was aware it wasn't going to happen. I don't think he wanted another war, but he was sensible enough to realise it was coming.
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Sep 23, 2016 15:36
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JcDent posted:Well, what about the height requirement for Centurion, M48/M60, the Chieftain, Leopards and whatever zooming deathtraps the French were building? Heck, skip the French and Germans, people care about them as much as they care about Sweden when it comes to discussing Cold War tonks. Then we can see if the stereotype has merit. Oh man, I need to look up the AMX 13 ergonomics report again. My favourite part was that you couldn't shift into certain gears while wearing thick gloves.
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Sep 23, 2016 15:50
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Chamberlain saw the military situation in 1938 as unwinnable for the Allies. He was probably wrong (if a war had actually started over Czechoslovakia the German General Staff had serious plans to overthrow Hitler) but it was a rational belief at the time.
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Sep 23, 2016 15:52
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Oh good Lord yes. Oh no not a swipe at you at all - a clarification that my favourite bit is that we're both right with opposing statements because historiography is great fun. (Edit: Older dons have little dons, Upon their work to rewrite 'em, And little dons have later dons, and so, ad infinitum.) It is all very gbh territory, especially given that every belligerent nation had alllllllll sorts of crazy potential peace plans at various points, and that Versailles and all the land settlements were weirdly inconsistent - It's odd to think that Germany got really shafted, but the Ottomans dismembered. lenoon fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Sep 23, 2016 |
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Sep 23, 2016 15:55
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anakha posted:Not sure if this has already been asked, but here goes: 1st Gulf war, Battle of 73 Easting. US and UK forces lose around 30 AFVs and about 70 total casualties while taking out over 300 Iraqi AFVs and near 3000 casualties. Also check out the Battle of the Philippine Sea, US end with 1 battleship damaged, Japanese end with 3 sunk fleet carriers, around 600 planes shot down and basically all of their trained carrier aviators killed, a blow from which the IJN never really covered. spectralent posted:Chamberlain immediately ordered a ramping up of military production following his "peace in our time" speech, because he was aware it wasn't going to happen. I don't think he wanted another war, but he was sensible enough to realise it was coming. The British public were really, really not looking to get involved in another war on the continent in 1938. Churchill was pretty much alone in being the one saying "Hitler is bad, we should go to war with him right now" but the more you learn about his antics in WWI and before the more you realise why no-one listened to Winston Churchill about war
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Sep 23, 2016 16:01
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I've always wondered - ever since firearms became commonplace on the battlefield, how important has it been to protect soldiers' hearing? I'd expect that a modern battlefield is amazingly loud, do you normally wear hearing protection at all so you can still hear things going on afterwards?
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Sep 23, 2016 16:06
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lenoon posted:Oh no not a swipe at you at all - a clarification that my favourite bit is that we're both right with opposing statements because historiography is great fun. Now that I think of it you've probably got your recollections of Evans mixed up with Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which has a weird bit where Shirer (a journalist, not a historian) postulates that Hitler was the culmination of German political history stretching back to Frederick the Great or some such nonsense. Evans in Coming of the Third Reich just spends a lot of time talking about the various things in Wilhelmine Germany that made a political party like the Nazis possible and how said Nazis were able to game the system and bludgeon their way to absolute power. There's nothing teleological in Evans, and IIRC he specifically warns against such readings.
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Sep 23, 2016 16:07
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Please explain what "teleology" means for those of us in the cheap seats, thank you.
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Sep 23, 2016 16:13
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SquadronROE posted:I've always wondered - ever since firearms became commonplace on the battlefield, how important has it been to protect soldiers' hearing? I'd expect that a modern battlefield is amazingly loud, do you normally wear hearing protection at all so you can still hear things going on afterwards?
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Sep 23, 2016 16:14
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P-Mack posted:Please explain what "teleology" means for those of us in the cheap seats, thank you. Teleology, in history, is the idea that history has some definite "purpose" or end-state that we're advancing to. A common example is Whig history, which is the idea that Anglo-style liberal democracy is the best thing ever and all of history is just a progression to that point. Generally dismissed and frowned upon nowadays in the academy, but it's still common to see people talk about history like it's just a big game of civilization. You see this sometimes when people ask why Africa hasn't "advanced" or dumb poo poo like that.
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Sep 23, 2016 16:24
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SquadronROE posted:I've always wondered - ever since firearms became commonplace on the battlefield, how important has it been to protect soldiers' hearing? I'd expect that a modern battlefield is amazingly loud, do you normally wear hearing protection at all so you can still hear things going on afterwards? Modern-as-in-today people might have had poo poo, but before relatively recently no one gave a gently caress. drat near every WW2 vet I've known who saw combat had serious hearing issues. That said, I also recall as far back as the ACW artillery crews making improvised earplugs, so it probably also depends on how much your exposure was due to the excitement of combat or the nature of your job. i.e. the difference between an infantryman who might fire his gun once in a while and an artilleryman who does that on a daily basis.
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Sep 23, 2016 16:25
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Hearing protection was also a big issue until recently because electronic earmuffs and earplugs that can selectively filter out loud noises are a modern invention. Previously, a soldier wearing earplugs would be sacrificing his ability to notice potential threats. As has been said, it's a different matter for artillery because you're typically not listening for a guy sneaking through the jungle looking to slice your ankles.
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Sep 23, 2016 16:32
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Grenrow posted:Teleology, in history, is the idea that history has some definite "purpose" or end-state that we're advancing to. A common example is Whig history, which is the idea that Anglo-style liberal democracy is the best thing ever and all of history is just a progression to that point. See also all that Marxist poo poo about historical inevitability.
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Sep 23, 2016 16:38
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There's good bits of Marxist history (history is a succession of bastards stomping on the poor) and bad bits of Marxist history (literally all the rest of it). Marxist history is one where everyone acknowledges it's consciously constructing a narrative towards an end, Whig history is the one everyone thinks they acknowledge, but actually it's practitioners (and their academic descendants are everywhere). ALL PRO, I think you're right about me getting the two positions confused, though I'd still be wary of drawing too many lines between imperial Germany and Naziism, unless you're acknowledging the fact that it could have happened just about anywhere given different proximate causes and experiences between the wars. Id be cautious because it's such a powerful and tempting argument to project back, (but by no means a totally illegitimate one), so I guess it's a case of needing to go and check the coming which is a pain because I'm still reading about castles.
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Sep 23, 2016 16:51
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JcDent posted:Well, what about the height requirement for Centurion, M48/M60, the Chieftain, Leopards and whatever zooming deathtraps the French were building? Heck, skip the French and Germans, people care about them as much as they care about Sweden when it comes to discussing Cold War tonks. Then we can see if the stereotype has merit. The good parts: quote:The extremely limited interior space prevents movement from the commander's to the gunner's station. There is space provided to move from the commander's station to the driver's area. However, the opening provided measured only 14 inches wide by 20 inches deep; this could be accomplished by only the smallest of crewmen. Dead weight drag would be almost impossible to or from the turret using this access opening. The evaluator (95th percentile in stature) found it very difficult accessing much of the tank interior because of the restricted space. quote:Table I-i summarizes selected measurements of the driver's station, including seat dimensions. Five out of the nine dimensions failed to meet human engineering design criteria of MIL-STD-1472C. Seat pan and back rest dimensions fall far short of standards, with a very limited seat depth of only 6.5 inches. Figure 1-6 shows the driver's seat in the AMX-13 viewed from the hatch opening.The seat pan is inadequate to support the popliteal understruc-ture of the legs. At the lowest adjustment, the seat sets flush with the floor. However, there appeared to be barely enough static elbow room(22.5 inches). Shoulder clearance was restricted to about 5 inches short of standards and would pose a problem for even the smaller stature crewmen. quote:No seat restraint system was observed. The tight fit, however, would prevent excessive lateral body movement.  quote:Overall, the human engineering design of the AMX-13 driver's station, based on static crew station measurements and evaluator observations, is judged inadequate. 
Ensign Expendable fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Sep 23, 2016 |
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Sep 23, 2016 16:53
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If you like podcasts, the design podcast 99% Invisible did a recent episode about hearing loss in combat. It's mostly about contemporary warfare and current efforts to come up with a technological solution: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/combat-hearing-loss/ There is also a bit in there about the tradeoff in hearing protection between needing to hear certain noises (like guys coming to ambush you) and needing to not hear others (the ambushers shooting automatic weapons at you from close range) IIRC there is a little bit about why combat hearing loss is a more serious problem in modern times, and it has to do with intensification of firepower. Very loud noises are bad for your hearing generally, but permanent damage is more likely if things are very loud continuously for a period of time. So, depending on your role in combat you would have varying levels of hearing loss. People who worked around artillery or on the gundeck of a ship were more likely to get hearing damage in battle than musketeers, who would have been correspondingly more likely to lose their hearing than, say, pikemen. In the modern period combat is loud as gently caress. There is a lot of artillery, explosions, and rapid fire weapons, and significant hearing loss is a basically inevitable result of combat unless you take steps to protect your ears.
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Sep 23, 2016 16:54
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EvanSchenck posted:People who worked around artillery or on the gundeck of a ship were more likely to get hearing damage in battle than musketeers, who would have been correspondingly more likely to lose their hearing than, say, pikemen.
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Sep 23, 2016 16:57
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SquadronROE posted:I've always wondered - ever since firearms became commonplace on the battlefield, how important has it been to protect soldiers' hearing? I'd expect that a modern battlefield is amazingly loud, do you normally wear hearing protection at all so you can still hear things going on afterwards? During my first deployment in like 2002 you only got the stupid rubber triple flange plugs that were pretty useless. Eventually they started issuing really expensive high quality over the ear ones that plug into the radio and even filter ambient noises, so you can hear stuff you need to but then they protect you from the loud damaging stuff. They also have earbud type protectors that do the same thing but I've never worn those, that's obviously the wave of the future. Gunners back in the day would just stuff paper in their ears, which I'd imagine worked pretty well all things considered. Amusing anachronism: in artillery training today (as back then) practically every order/command is yelled as loud as possible even though it isn't really necessary anymore. Also if you want to talk deaf as gently caress just find a pilot who flew before about 1980 or so.
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Sep 23, 2016 16:59
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What kind of a military is this where yelling all the time as loud as possible isn't necessary?
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Sep 23, 2016 17:01
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lenoon posted:ALL PRO, I think you're right about me getting the two positions confused, though I'd still be wary of drawing too many lines between imperial Germany and Naziism, unless you're acknowledging the fact that it could have happened just about anywhere given different proximate causes and experiences between the wars. Id be cautious because it's such a powerful and tempting argument to project back, (but by no means a totally illegitimate one), so I guess it's a case of needing to go and check the coming which is a pain because I'm still reading about castles. IIRC Evans is very emphatic that he's talking about things specific to Germany and Germany alone. His discussion of German cultural things at the beginning of the book is basically an effort to explain why the early Nazi party appealed to the people that it did, and the rest of the book is about how the Nazis were able to bludgeon and rules-lawyer their way to power despite never actually having anything more than, at best, a very slight plurality of supporters in the German populace (he very astutely points out that the proportional representation system used in Weimar Germany's elections guaranteed the Nazis seats they could never have won in head-to-head elections).
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Sep 23, 2016 17:01
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I think it makes sense that any German settlement would be more harsh because of the way Versailles constituted a compromise between those that wanted Germany punished harshly (France, in particular) and those who wanted a fairly lenient deal (the US). A victorious Germany wouldn't have anyone like a Woodrow Wilson to tone things down.
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Sep 23, 2016 17:13
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Confirmed: Americans don't know anything about warfare, tanks, or life in generalquote:
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Sep 23, 2016 17:18
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