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Battle of Amiens Wiki Article posted:The battle began in dense fog at 4:20 am on 8 August 1918 I just can't trust anything on the internet which says something happened at 4:20.
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Oct 25, 2016 06:44
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SeanBeansShako posted:And on that subject, gently caress you De Gaulle. wasn't that a condition made by eisenhower for allowing the french to be the ones to liberate Paris the way i've heard the story, there was a meeting where de Gaulle demanded that french soldiers formally occupy the city and he was met with "sure so long as it's a white division", and, having no fully white divisions, he organised a major troop exchange programme V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Oct 25, 2016 |
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Oct 25, 2016 06:57
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This will sound like a strange question, but in the thread's various opinions, what factors led to Russia being seemingly so much better at war than everyone else? They did all the real work in WW2, would have effortlessly turned all of Europe into Stalin's backyard afterwards if nukes hadn't been in play, and they got taken out of WW1 by revolution but otherwise it seems like the only ones able to do much against them were the Mongols.
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Oct 25, 2016 09:58
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Never read that one. I should probably see if I can borrow it from someone.  To add a minor clarifications about my old posts about women in the Serbian army in WW1, it was never about them being particularly numerous, but about them existing, and not being considered especially extraordinary by other soldiers. They weren't Valkyries, just grumpy underfed people in poorly fitting coats who killed and got killed in the big ole bloody clusterfuck called the Great War, just like every other soldier out there. I'm mostly pointing this out because I really don't like the fetishization of women soldiers that is present in propaganda, currently mostly Pesh and Russian, but also sometimes American (and of course, ours), and don't want to accidentally contribute to it. Flesnolk posted:This will sound like a strange question, but in the thread's various opinions, what factors led to Russia being seemingly so much better at war than everyone else? They did all the real work in WW2, would have effortlessly turned all of Europe into Stalin's backyard afterwards if nukes hadn't been in play, and they got taken out of WW1 by revolution but otherwise it seems like the only ones able to do much against them were the Mongols. Eh. Crimean war? Russo-Japanese war? There's plenty of wars Russia lost. It's just so goddamn huge that if a war turns into an attrition-y slugfest, Russia has an advantage.
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Oct 25, 2016 10:13
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I'll mea culpa on forgetting the Russo-Japanese War happened at the very least. My bad.
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Oct 25, 2016 10:18
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Flesnolk posted:This will sound like a strange question, but in the thread's various opinions, what factors led to Russia being seemingly so much better at war than everyone else? They did all the real work in WW2, would have effortlessly turned all of Europe into Stalin's backyard afterwards if nukes hadn't been in play, and they got taken out of WW1 by revolution but otherwise it seems like the only ones able to do much against them were the Mongols. I've got to dispute the notion that they would 'effortlessly' have conquered Europe, British and US leaders were anticipating a conflict with Stalin if things went hot. They were definitely the most experienced force, with great experience in combined arms and a poo poo-ton of armour and planes, but that is more due to years of a total war era planned economy than some innate Russian superiority at warfare. Also, they weren't doing extremely hot in WW1, and would not have dominated the theatre, even if the revolution had not happened.
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Oct 25, 2016 10:24
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Flesnolk posted:This will sound like a strange question, but in the thread's various opinions, what factors led to Russia being seemingly so much better at war than everyone else? They did all the real work in WW2, would have effortlessly turned all of Europe into Stalin's backyard afterwards if nukes hadn't been in play, and they got taken out of WW1 by revolution but otherwise it seems like the only ones able to do much against them were the Mongols. I would pretty strongly dispute the "better at war than everyone else" notion. The Russian Revolution, while a civilian revolution, was in large part caused by the almost unbroken chain of defeats the Russian Army had suffered in WWI. The only real big success the Russians had against the Germans was the Brusilov Offensive, and even that bogged down due to huge logistical nightmares which plagued the army from day 1. Also bear in mind that the Germans in WWI were not exactly throwing everything at the Russians either, they knew that the main show was on the Western Front and distributed their forces appropriately. As for WWII the main things the Soviets did was 1. properly utilise their massive industrial capacity and 2. learn the proper lessons from WWI, specifically that nations had to be able to absorb staggering numbers of casualties and continue going. Therefore the Soviet army and state was set up to entirely replace all of their combat infantry in the first few months of the war. After that it was a case of rebuilding the leadership base after the purges and initial losses and leveraging their advantages against the massively overstretched Germans. Soviet domination of Europe was by no means a given if the USSR had carried on westward - the USSR was at its manpower limits come 1945 (especially compared to the USA) and had been fighting a depleted and demoralised German army for months - there was no guaranteed they were going to have any kind of success against the well supplied and experienced allied armies west of Berlin, nukes or no.
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Oct 25, 2016 10:59
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Baron Porkface posted:Has a head of state been captured or killed in the heat of battle since Napoleon III? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Salvador_Allende
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Oct 25, 2016 11:13
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Planned economies with heavy state involvement seem to do well in major war situations - the USSR might well be the prime example of that. I know the UK government pushed for extensive state control of war industries, but how far was the Arsenal of Democracy centrally planned?
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Oct 25, 2016 11:35
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lenoon posted:Planned economies with heavy state involvement seem to do well in major war situations - the USSR might well be the prime example of that. I know the UK government pushed for extensive state control of war industries, but how far was the Arsenal of Democracy centrally planned? I don't think you can run a major war without some form of central planning.
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Oct 25, 2016 11:47
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Mycroft Holmes posted:I don't think you can run a major war without some form of central planning.
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Oct 25, 2016 11:56
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Ensign Expendable posted:Red Orchestra was hilarious since if you could get more than one guy into a tank you'd completely dominate. That happened a grand total of once though, almost everyone would get out of the tank and grab a different one if someone else got in. I've spent way too much time with this game. It was glorious.
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Oct 25, 2016 11:59
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Mycroft Holmes posted:I don't think you can run a major war without some form of central planning. Thats a given, but how far did the US go? Was FDR sending threatening notes to B17 factories?
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Oct 25, 2016 12:12
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lenoon posted:Planned economies with heavy state involvement seem to do well in major war situations - the USSR might well be the prime example of that. I know the UK government pushed for extensive state control of war industries, but how far was the Arsenal of Democracy centrally planned? The USSR is one example, sure, but IIRC all the state actors in WW2 had extensive involvement in the production of arms.
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Oct 25, 2016 12:18
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lenoon posted:Thats a given, but how far did the US go? Was FDR sending threatening notes to B17 factories? It wasn't quite that bad - nobody was being threatened with banishment to Alaska - but the amount of regulation and control over the economy was immense. You had rationing of food and fuel; you had the state outright expropriating things like automotive tires for the rubber; you had price controls for buying and selling. The state could also dictate to companies what they wanted them to do, essentially. It was an amazing amount of fuckery; I think it worked very well with minimal economic effects because 1) the people FDR had administering this program were really sharp, and also understood economics, and 2) the American people by the time war actually happened accepted all of it as necessary to kill fascists. Life magazine has a lot of little vignettes about American WW2 rationing which I can dig up if there is interest.
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Oct 25, 2016 13:16
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lenoon posted:Planned economies with heavy state involvement seem to do well in major war situations - the USSR might well be the prime example of that. I know the UK government pushed for extensive state control of war industries, but how far was the Arsenal of Democracy centrally planned? Rationing of consumer goods is one extreme example of planned war economy and everyone was doing it. In part the economic policies of the Great Depression which were still in place in many countries helped in centralizing control of economy to government. I don't know specifics about how the industrial part was handled, but Wikipedia mentions this: quote:In the case of the Second World War, the U.S. government took similar measures in increasing its control over the economy. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor provided the spark needed to begin conversion to a wartime economy. With this attack, Washington felt that a greater bureaucracy was needed to help with mobilization.[5] The government raised taxes which paid for half of the war’s costs and borrowed money in the form of war bonds to cover the rest of the bill.[3] “Commercial institutions like banks also bought billions of dollars of bonds and other treasury paper, holding more than $24 billion at the war’s end."[5] The creation of a handful of agencies helped funnel resources towards the war effort. One prominent agency was the War Productions board (WPB), which “awarded defense contracts, allocated scarce resources – such as rubber, copper, and oil – for military uses, and persuaded businesses to convert to military production."[3] Two-thirds of the American economy had been integrated into the war effort by the end of 1943.[3] Because of this massive cooperation between government and private entities, it could be argued that the economic measures enacted prior to and during the Second World War helped lead the Allies to victory. Baron Porkface posted:Has a head of state been captured or killed in the heat of battle since Napoleon III? Soviet special forces assaulted Afghan presidential palace and killed president Amin in 1979. All revolutionary leaders of Grenada were captured in 1983, but I don't know if that counts as a serious answer... also whether Manuel Noriega counts as being captured in the heat of battle depends on definition, but he got trapped by a military operation anyway and was shortly thereafter forced to surrender. Nenonen fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Oct 25, 2016 |
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Oct 25, 2016 13:33
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I think you have to draw a line between government leaders being essentially arrested or assassinated by military forces and actually meeting their fate in a capacity as a field commander. Napoleon III becoming a POW is a totally different situation than Noreaga. Gadadfi getting killed is likewise fundamentally different than if a arty shell had burst between the afore mentioned N3's feet. Given that when was the last time a head of state actually took field command of his army? N3 was considered pretty wacky for doing it when he did and just about everyone saw it as him trying to emulate his more famous namesake.
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Oct 25, 2016 14:37
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Anyone know anything about Operation Barras? I just came across it, and it sounds incredible that one squadron of the SAS could kill or capture a majority of militia members!
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Oct 25, 2016 14:55
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Not quite the question, but last night I was reading about Solferino, according to Wikipedia the last major battle where all sides were under the direct command of their monarchs (N3, Victor Emmanuel II, Franz Joseph).
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Oct 25, 2016 15:02
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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lenoon posted:Thats a given, but how far did the US go? Was FDR sending threatening notes to B17 factories? I am altering the production order. Pray I don't alter it any further 
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Oct 25, 2016 15:55
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What was the process of joining the army like in the musket era, Napoleon, US revolution and civil war, that period. Especially draftees. How did they contact you, what training did you typically undertake, did anyone die?
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Oct 25, 2016 16:49
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Flesnolk posted:This will sound like a strange question, but in the thread's various opinions, what factors led to Russia being seemingly so much better at war than everyone else? They did all the real work in WW2, would have effortlessly turned all of Europe into Stalin's backyard afterwards if nukes hadn't been in play, and they got taken out of WW1 by revolution but otherwise it seems like the only ones able to do much against them were the Mongols. Russia had, much like America, an extremely powerful industrial and manpower base from which to fight the war. The analogy I would make is Japan versus America in the pacific. Japan had a navy and an air force, and used it to good effect in the attack at pearl harbour, but after that, they were hosed. They were hosed from the moment they attacked, to be honest, because they were fighting the US. The US built nearly twice as many aircraft carriers in the time between the start of the war with Japan and the end of the war, than Japan had ever built up to that point, while also building materiel for lend-lease and for the attack on France. Japan would have had to win stunning victories all the time just to keep US naval strength at an even level. Similarly with Germany, Germany had a very powerful standing army at the time of the war's initiation, but that doesn't help much when faced against the sheer economic output of the USSR by the time their assault stalled. They won massive victories all along their attack but all of those losses were replaced with interest, whereas Germany simply couldn't output that amount of manpower or equipment. War is, in a very significant way, a conflict of economies. And so nations which can leverage their entire economy onto a war footing, as the centralized USSR economy was (and the US, to a degree, all nations tend to adopt a command economy of sorts when the poo poo hits the fan), and who have access to vast raw material deposits, as the USSR and the US did, have a major advantage. Germany, for all its good ideas at the start of the war, remained a comparatively tiny landmass compared to the US and the USSR, and suffered material shortages quite badly, having already been fighting everybody for years at that point. There's a lot you can say about management differences, areas of excellence and error on all sides, a lot of very relevant and worthwhile things too, because efficient tactics and management of resources are good on any scale, but it's all a little bit eclipsed, I think, by the fact that the major victors in the war were the biggest industrialized nations at the time, capable of outputting vastly more manpower and equipment than the other contributors. A well equipped, massive army has a significant advantage over one that is hurting for soldiers and weapons. A better way perhaps to look at is is less "why was the USSR so good" and more "why was nazi germany so loving bad at decision making when it came to getting into fights" OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Oct 25, 2016 |
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Oct 25, 2016 16:59
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The French Revolutionary Army was the first conscript force. All others were nominally volunteer or forced service as a judicial punishment. If you can find Alan Forrest's Conscripts and Deserters: The Army and French Society during Revolution and Empire that will tell you all you need to know and a whole lot more. Keep in mind that France is one of the most centralized states in Europe at the time, so it's relatively easy to get a proclamation calling up a certain class read in every village in the country. As the war advanced, the French countryside was swarmed with young men dodging the draft or those who had deserted from their cantonments or the various fronts. The quality of training ranged from god-awful levee en mass in the early days of the revolution (get a musket and rudimentary training, maybe a few days of formal instruction at most), to fairly decent in the late Republic / early Empire, to bad in the late Empire. In the middle years, the Army had a hard-core very large cadre of battle trained veterans that would complete "advanced" training by default in the field. The goal of training in a cantonment was to get the recruit to wear the uniform correctly, to understand drill and command, and to understand the operation of the firearm and the bayonet. Not a lot of classroom time on tactics, etc. The question about people dying is a bit odd. Of course people died in training. People die in training today. They died a lot, whether from accidents with weapons (rare) to disease (common).
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Oct 25, 2016 17:17
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Everybody else already has, but I wanna jump on the pile anyways - I'd certainly contest the notion that the Russians are somehow better at war than everyone else. WWI Eastern Front the only real success they had was the Brusilov offensive and even that fell apart rather quickly - or at least, it certainly wasn't some miracle offensive of Russian prowess. In WWII they certainly did NOT do "all the real work", unless I missed the part where Soviet forces fought the entire Pacific Theater and the Western Front and Italy and North Africa and carried out all the strategic bombing/naval blockades the brought both major Axis powers to their knees. They most likely wouldn't have steamrolled western Europe either, even without nukes in the picture. Yes, the Soviets had probably the largest and most hardened land army of the time, but they had pretty much tapped out both their industrial capacity and manpower. If the Soviets decided they wanted a war with the western Allies they probably could have wrecked the border units initially, but the Allies (especially the US) had piles of unused manpower and economies still not completely converted to a war focus that could easily pick up the slack. Plus, the Soviet Union had basically no navy or strategic air force so goodbye any industry in range of B-29's or whatever you have to import over water. Ok, I may have gotten a little carried away there, but the point is the Russians tend to do so well in wars (and by no means all wars, see Russo-Japanese, Crimean, etc.) because they're so big, and by extent have such large reserves of manpower, resources, and industry. Wars (more modern ones, at least) tend to come down to who has the bigger numbers - not necessarily in the HUMAN WAVES sense but in the "we can manufacture and crew 10 times more tanks/planes/ships/rifles/etc. than you can" sense, and Russia has lots of big numbers, especially when compared to who they've historically fought, e.g. Germany.
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Oct 25, 2016 17:21
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I feel like a good portion of the Russian cheerleading that you see in smarter internet circles (ie, this one) is in a lot of ways a reaction to the hordes of Wehrmacht-obsessed people that seem to be all over the place that have been annoying the internet for many years. Also to that end, you often see it argued that the Soviets were at the bottom of the barrel with regards to manpower in 1945, but I've never seen any real numbers behind this. I know a lot of their frontline divisions were basically so in name only, but I've never seen any real analysis on what the country had left in the tank had the war continued.
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Oct 25, 2016 17:35
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gradenko_2000 posted:I am altering the production order. Pray I don't alter it any further A good example of the US government getting involved in production is the saga of the Navy and Brewster (of F2A Buffalo fame). Brewster Aeronautical was a hot mess, with the Navy seizing their plants in 1942 to try to sort the mess out.
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Oct 25, 2016 17:35
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Russia wasn't good at war. The Soviet Union was by 1943. They were in really rough shape at the start due to the purges and some seriously dysfunctional reactions to combat experience. However, much as Germany had an advantage in that their military was getting prepared for war sooner than anyone else's, the USSR was preparing its industry and society earlier, and despite the purges had some competence to draw on. So after the dysfunctional mess of their military-political order was shattered in 1941 they had what it took to rebuild something really capable with the benefit of fresh combat experience. The only country that had the sheer industrial resources was starting out with a military barely large enough to do war games, little budget to have decent materiel to start with, and their war experience provided by the military equivalent of telephone.
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Oct 25, 2016 17:37
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bewbies posted:the hordes of Wehrmacht-obsessed people edit: content:   uh, rude (Olivares: The Statesman in an Age of Decline,) HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Oct 25, 2016 |
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Oct 25, 2016 17:38
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Fusion Restaurant posted:I just can't trust anything on the internet which says something happened at 4:20. In "dense fog" no less 
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Oct 25, 2016 17:39
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OwlFancier posted:A better way perhaps to look at is is less "why was the USSR so good" and more "why was nazi germany so loving bad at decision making when it came to getting into fights" Germany had at that point a military culture based on winning short wars with daring and decisive tactical maneuvers. This was borne out of the realities of 18th century Prussia, a small, poor state surrounded by enemies who were eying it up hungrily. Prussia succeeded in its wars with France, Russia and Austria in this century thanks to a brilliant leader in Frederick the Great, a very well trained and supplied army and a lot of luck. Then, instead of this experience being seen as out of the ordinary, Germany has further success with this model, against Austria and then France, who both surrender in relatively short order after decisive battles at Königgrätz and Sedan. This then feeds further into the pre-war planning for what becomes WWI with the infamous Schlieffen-Moltke plan, a war plan that entirely revolves around one, single, dominating haymaker that knocks the principle enemy out of the war in six weeks. Now as we all know, the Schlieffen plan doesn't work - but in the east the German army wins several spectacularly successful and surprising victories at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes, leading to a process that ultimately concludes with Russia, the giant with a million men under arms that everyone feared prior to the war, being brought to its knees with force of arms and a single guy on a train. Ultimately the Germans end up losing the war overall but importantly the stab-in-the-back myth develops almost instantly, giving the armed forces the excuse that they were never defeated, not really, and could have turned things around if only they had been given the chance. After all, look at how Frederick pulled things back when Prussia was on the brink! So with this pedigree you can see how the German armed forces really thought they could win a war against all comers through decisive maneuver. This is really reflected in the ways the Germans approached leadership and tactics - daring encirclements headed by armour that left flanks exposed but could surround and take out huge chunks of enemy armies in one go, as happened in France and during Barbarossa. The problem was that this emphasis on winning wars quickly through decisive tactics meant other things really fell by the wayside - notably intelligence and logistics were always undervalued by the Germans, as was arguably strategy. Combine this with the overconfidence that comes from crushing France and Poland under your heel in record short time and you have a dangerous cocktail for making decisions about who you can take on in a war.
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Oct 25, 2016 17:40
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bewbies posted:I feel like a good portion of the Russian cheerleading that you see in smarter internet circles (ie, this one) is in a lot of ways a reaction to the hordes of Wehrmacht-obsessed people that seem to be all over the place that have been annoying the internet for many years. I think it's equally a reaction to the public western narrative about the war though, where it's all Brits and Americans defeating the Nazis in Africa, Italy and Western Europe. Whereas the Wehrmacht took something like 85% of it's losses on the Eastern Front I think is the number that gets bandied about? It's probably impossible to cleanly separate the theatres given Lend-Lease and Strategic Bombing, but it always gets my goat that the Soviet contribution often feels like a footnote in the popular narrative. And then doubly so for WWI. The reason for that is probably simply that our perceptions are so dependent on TV and film productions, which obviously produces American and British stories for American and British audiences. I do wonder if the the post-war Red Scare and Cold War attitudes contributed to a general desire to downplay Russian contributions in the wars.
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Oct 25, 2016 17:41
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Nebakenezzer posted:Life magazine has a lot of little vignettes about American WW2 rationing which I can dig up if there is interest. Yes please.
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Oct 25, 2016 17:48
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"The bulk of the fighting " is a bit of a nebulous concept, but they did do the bulk of the dying, by far, as illustrated by this graphic from wikipedia.
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Oct 25, 2016 17:54
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I do wonder if Russia could have at least stalemated the Russo Japanese war were it not for domestic disturbances. While their navy was completely shattered, the land battles were as costly for the Japanese as they were for the Russians, with the Port Arthur siege being almost a pyrrhic victory for Jaan.
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Oct 25, 2016 18:01
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The graphic from Wikipedia ignores how they died. A Soviet soldier that dies as a POW counts as dead, whereas a German soldier that's still removed from fighting by capture but survives captivity does not.
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Oct 25, 2016 18:01
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:I do wonder if Russia could have at least stalemated the Russo Japanese war were it not for domestic disturbances. While their navy was completely shattered, the land battles were as costly for the Japanese as they were for the Russians, with the Port Arthur siege being almost a pyrrhic victory for Japan. That's precisely the set of conditions that led to the Treaty of Portsmouth. Do you mean that the Russians could have rolled back Japanese territorial gains in Manchuria?
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Oct 25, 2016 18:14
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vintagepurple posted:What was the process of joining the army like in the musket era, Napoleon, US revolution and civil war, that period. Especially draftees. How did they contact you, what training did you typically undertake, did anyone die? Well I can speak for the Napoleonic Wars British Army here now. For the normal volunteer you and your mates basically approached a recruiting party which essentially was an officer, two NCO and a drummer putting on some grand old street theater usually outside ye old pub. If you were down with the whole going to exotic places, meeting interesting people and no doubt attemting to kill them whilst avoiding dying from disease he'd happy sign you on (if you can't write, mark the paper with an X!). If you changed your mind in the night you stupid bastard why do you think the local ladies of the night suggested kinky handcuff games. And yes, that is a sergeant spooning you in the bed to ensure you stay. Of course after this and a nights worth of drinking your sign up bounty away with several other blokes curious or desperate for employment you had to be taken to both a local doctor to ensure you were healthy enough to go get yourself shot in the face with the other now extremely hung over blokes are briefly seen over by the local magistrate who asks you if your still cool with this and if so you are in service for at least 7 years of your life during the Napoleonic Wars. Then there is the man in the Militia soldier or officer which through different schemes and systems could transfer over into the British Army. And finally that jerk rear end criminal which was given a choice of rottiing in Newgate, rotting on a prison Hulk or rotting in Australia. Guess those men suddenly became patriots over night.
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Oct 25, 2016 18:25
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:That's precisely the set of conditions that led to the Treaty of Portsmouth. Do you mean that the Russians could have rolled back Japanese territorial gains in Manchuria? Ehh Japan could have gotten more out of Portsmouth were it not for US interference but yeah, considering sheer manpower amd the fact that the Japanese strategists were not really very better (seriously, Port Arthur was full of the same stupid blunders they kept on doing on WW2), the Russians could have turned the War into one of attrition and retake some of their lost positions on the continent.
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Oct 25, 2016 18:30
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OwlFancier posted:War is, in a very significant way, a conflict of economies. And so nations which can leverage their entire economy onto a war footing, as the centralized USSR economy was (and the US, to a degree, all nations tend to adopt a command economy of sorts when the poo poo hits the fan), and who have access to vast raw material deposits, as the USSR and the US did, have a major advantage. Germany, for all its good ideas at the start of the war, remained a comparatively tiny landmass compared to the US and the USSR, and suffered material shortages quite badly, having already been fighting everybody for years at that point. Well, while this is true, it wasn't just prewar Germany (a much larger Germany than today, don't forget - it included Austria, western Poland, the Czech Republic, etc), but also occupied France, Belgium, Denmark, etc, plus co-belligerants such as Italy and Hungary and even volunteers from Spain. The Soviet Union was fighting essentially the rest of Europe (granted, a lot of it not exactly fully on-board with the plan) minus the UK and Ireland. It's not quite as one-sided as you might think.
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Oct 25, 2016 19:20
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The whole "minus UK and Ireland" part is something approaching a gamechanger, the British Empire is still very much A Thing, rivaled only for the position of world superpower by those upstart colonials on the opposite side of the Atlantic, so just leaving them hanging about with no forces watching them is a recipe for defeat meaning plenty of forces need to garrison western Europe. Plus, the only other major military power on the continent is France and they are by no means enthusiastic about helping the Germans fight the Soviets so it does kinda end up as (an admittedly large) Germany v. the USSR.
Crazycryodude fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Oct 25, 2016 |
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Oct 25, 2016 19:29
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