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Ensign Expendable posted:The ability to look up Soviet records to compare to German versions of events will never not be amazing. I read about a battle where (as the Germans claim) two Mechanized Corps' worth of T-34s drove into their ambush and 90% of them were destroyed. Actual Soviet tank losses for that day, across the entire Front: 5. Could be worse, could be a formation of B-17s claiming some 50+ fighters when the only reported losses were 2. Kill claims are always a wonderful thing, and never 100% accurate 
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Oct 27, 2016 05:19
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Ensign Expendable posted:The ability to look up Soviet records to compare to German versions of events will never not be amazing. I read about a battle where (as the Germans claim) two Mechanized Corps' worth of T-34s drove into their ambush and 90% of them were destroyed. Actual Soviet tank losses for that day, across the entire Front: 5. Obviously the Soviets were lying because Stalin.
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Oct 27, 2016 05:23
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BattleMoose posted:One of the previous posters suggested that mobile warfare could be achieved using tanks in waves(?). So what if you have group A tanks bite, group 1 infantry holds. Group B tanks bite in front of Groups A and 1, and group 2 infantry holds? You're never getting Mobile Warfare as defined by WW2, but I don't think that was entirely the point. 
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Oct 27, 2016 05:22
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Could be worse, could be a formation of B-17s claiming some 50+ fighters when the only reported losses were 2. That's probably why the majority of the book counts German claims in vague artsy terms like "hundreds", "piles" and "hordes". BattleMoose posted:One of the previous posters suggested that mobile warfare could be achieved using tanks in waves(?). Tanks are used in waves, typically a wave of slow thickly armoured tanks to soak up hits from whatever AT guns your artillery didn't suppress and then a wave of lightly armoured faster tanks to exploit the breakthrough the heavy tanks made.
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Oct 27, 2016 05:26
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HEY GAL posted:little of value was lost. Speak up these stolen flags are loud af
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Oct 27, 2016 05:30
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Ensign Expendable posted:That's probably why the majority of the book counts German claims in vague artsy terms like "hundreds", "piles" and "hordes". The Nazis conquered a lot of countries and set up a lot of regimes to keep people in place. Not only that, but they kept kill claims vague in order to continuously change the narrative even after proven wrong. I guess you could say they were puppet masters 
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Oct 27, 2016 05:37
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Jobbo_Fett posted:So what if you have group A tanks bite, group 1 infantry holds. Group A, of tanks is fine. I have very serious doubts that Group B will exist in any meaningful numbers, its literally the drive of 10 miles to cover the ground gained by Group A that will knock them out. Some numbers: quote:Of the forty-nine tanks shipped to the Somme, only thirty-two were able to begin the first attack in which they were used and only nine made it across "no man's land" to the German lines. @Cambrai They committed 437 tanks to the assault. After the first day 71 had suffered mechanical failure and 43 had ditched. Not counting the 65 that were actually destroyed by the Germans. And sure, if you have enough tanks and you could keep enough in reserve to have a Group B in position for the assault on Day Two. I don't think there is any capacity for Group C to even exist for Day Three. And you can of course recover tanks but not to be ready for action for Day Two or Three. Doing it this way, in waves, means you will lose so much offensive potential, just in driving tanks into position. Much better to get as many tanks in position as possible on Day One, and get them fighting the Germans as much as possible, attacking on a broad front, and let them go for as long as possible. This is what they did, very bitey and holdy. No potential for any kind of mobile warfare. EDIT: All numbers from wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanks_in_World_War_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cambrai_(1917)
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Oct 27, 2016 05:44
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Jobbo_Fett posted:The Nazis conquered a lot of countries and set up a lot of regimes to keep people in place. Or maybe the Eastern Front was rigged, and the Germans was just doing some creative unskewing.
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Oct 27, 2016 06:28
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gemuse posted:Or maybe the Eastern Front was rigged, and the Germans was just doing some creative unskewing. I know youre joking but I can't help but imagine someone somewhere thinks actually happened and Icant for the life of me come up with an answer to why. Probably for the best, really. 
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Oct 27, 2016 06:46
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gradenko_2000 posted:What was the strategic significance of the Khe Sanh combat base? Why was LBJ and Westmoreland even willing to consider the use of nuclear weapons just to protect this place? Further to that, why was it evacuated a few weeks after the siege? I thought re-running Dien-Bien-Phu-and-this-time-winning what was what Westermoreland wanted.
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Oct 27, 2016 06:50
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Jobbo_Fett posted:I know youre joking but I can't help but imagine someone somewhere thinks actually happened and Icant for the life of me come up with an answer to why. Yeah, reading USPOL and this thread at the same time makes me supremely uncomfortable.  At least it's not like the 30YW when everybody was Trump, except Richelieu, a man of Wealth and Taste, and Wallenstein, a man of Wealth and Mathemathical Computations.
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Oct 27, 2016 07:10
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BattleMoose posted:One of the previous posters suggested that mobile warfare could be achieved using tanks in waves(?). You can, but what they realized on D-Day was that the waves couldn't be too high: quote:Starting at about 0540, the 741st Tank Battalion put 29 DDs into the sea, but 27 of these sank, the remaining two made the long swim to the beach. Some of the crews of the sinking tanks managed to radio back and warn following units not to launch so far out. The remaining vehicles of the 741st Tank Battalion and all tanks of the 743rd Tank Battalion, (except for the four aboard one LCT that was hit by artillery fire just off the beach), were landed directly on the beach, starting at about 0640.
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Oct 27, 2016 08:02
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After Operation Michael though, then you start to get tanks involved in mobile warfare again. Luckily by then the tanks involved had been specifically designed with mobile warfare in mind, which were both more reliable and a hell of a lot quicker. There's even stuff like the Amiens whippet, probably the first time a single roaming tank caused havoc after punching too far through German lines. Theres even a legend that it carried on after the capture of the crew, a story that crops up in the most surprising places...
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Oct 27, 2016 08:07
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How did early anti-tank warfare work? Did you see a big lumbering metal box and go "Fritz I bet you 10 marks I can hit that thing with our gun"?
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Oct 27, 2016 08:14
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Nebakenezzer posted:No, all the parts are there...at one point not all chapters had links on the bottom for all the other chapters, but I fix'd that. Might be something wrong on my end, but this link doesn't take me to Part II, nor can I find it from the R100/R101 tag. v  v
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Oct 27, 2016 08:17
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Boiled Water posted:How did early anti-tank warfare work? Did you see a big lumbering metal box and go "Fritz I bet you 10 marks I can hit that thing with our gun"? Artillery firing at maximum depression, trench mortars, anti-tank rifles, hitting it repeatedly with machine gun fire because that armour spalls like a bastard, getting close to it and chucking grenades/flamethrower nozzles into vents and the always popular wait until it breaks or gets bogged down. The germans developed anti tank bullets and rifles, starting with the reversed bullet that wouldnt shatter when hitting tank armour, then the heavy K bullet. After that they started issuing the Mauser anti tank rifle, which operated in the same way as a modern anti-materiel rifle. This was a significant improvement on the bullet strategy which ended up putting so much strain on rifles that they could explode when fired.
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Oct 27, 2016 08:44
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Boiled Water posted:How did early anti-tank warfare work? Did you see a big lumbering metal box and go "Fritz I bet you 10 marks I can hit that thing with our gun"? Wwi tank armour was very thin by wwii standards. When they first arrived they were a rude shock. Machine guns could make things unpleasant for the tank crews, causing small pieces of metal inside the tank to fly about and, hurt (?) the crew. Artillery was effective though and so were ant aircraft guns if available. The germans quickly developed the k bullet, basically an armour piercing bullet that could be fired by the standard issue rifle, mauser. This could sometimes penetrate the armour of the earlier tanks. But armour/arms race and the mark iv had thicker armour and could resist it. By 1918 the germans developed the first specialized antitank rifle, t-gewhr. Operated by a 2 man crew and very unpleasant to fire. On my phone atm but I think this thing fairly regularly broke collar bones and burst ear drums. Recoil. There is an awesome modern video of it being fired, will post later. But due to the slow moving and predictable path of the tanks and that artillery was everywhere, it did a lot of the heavy work in knocking out and disabling tanks. Also anti tank ditches.
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Oct 27, 2016 08:50
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And up to date - not to self, don't let yourself get 2,000 post behind ever again.... Okay! Book recomendation time. I've just finished "Europe's Tragedy" and am looking for something new. After reading about how screwed up the armies were in the period, is there a good book on how they went from feudal levies to mercenaries? Or just on the mercs themselves? From what I get (this is a new period of history for me) it was a transition from the smaller forces and feudal lead to a more industrial pay led scheme - basically in the Feudal system, you had to fight because your local lord would know if you didn't. In the later periods you fought for pay and for your country, but I guess this was a transition period where you pretty much fought for pay. Then it became cheaper to just hire mercenaries rather than maintain a trained army? Many questions. Otherwise anything good on the Huns/Goths and the "Barbarian" invasion of Europe/Rome?
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Oct 27, 2016 10:35
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I thought "bite-and-hold" was a strategy that was practiced before tanks became a thing.
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Oct 27, 2016 11:30
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Grey Hunter posted:From what I get (this is a new period of history for me) it was a transition from the smaller forces and feudal lead to a more industrial pay led scheme - basically in the Feudal system, you had to fight because your local lord would know if you didn't. In the later periods you fought for pay and for your country, but I guess this was a transition period where you pretty much fought for pay. Then it became cheaper to just hire mercenaries rather than maintain a trained army? Roughly (very roughly, as we're talking about a period spanning hundreds of years and a geographical space spanning an entire continent), I'd prefer to think about the feudal system as one that relied on paid professionals as much as the following periods, just that the method of assembling them was different. A French baron's lance would contain not only knights in his service, but also professional soldiers kept on retainer. The baron pays for them, not the king. And the levies didn't contain untrained peasants, in places and times where the peasants were expected to fight, they usually trained for it. Like the Anglo-Saxon fyrd. But in general, the peasants didn't concern themselves with fighting wars and that is not their job, the feudal compact exists because the liege lord promises to defend those under him. Over the medieval period, you get more and more of the thing where the nobles pay the king money instead of fighting. The monarchs use this cash to hire professional soldiers. And when you get to the Early Modern, everyone has figured out that professional soldiers are the way to go.
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Oct 27, 2016 11:34
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Kill claims are always a wonderful thing, and never 100% accurate Sometimes goes the other way, too. The US Navy refused to believe the sinking of the Shinano by a submarine because they were sure that a super battleship midway into conversion into some unholy battleship-carrier thing didn't actually exist. Until the Japanese told the Americans yep, the Shinano was a thing and got torpedoed by a sub.
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Oct 27, 2016 12:45
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Cythereal posted:Sometimes goes the other way, too. The US Navy refused to believe the sinking of the Shinano by a submarine because they were sure that a super battleship midway into conversion into some unholy battleship-carrier thing didn't actually exist. Until the Japanese told the Americans yep, the Shinano was a thing and got torpedoed by a sub. Wasn't there a case where the USN believed there was one other IJN carrier called the Asahi or something that didn't actually exist and was based off of a bad translation?
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Oct 27, 2016 12:57
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BattleMoose posted:The idea of achieving mobile warfare and being able to supply it through the hellscape before the enemy fortified himself again, was not something that was achieved in WWI. I would argue it wasn't achievable given the technology of the time. Possibly true for the Western front, but the Mideast and Eastern fronts were relatively mobile.
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Oct 27, 2016 13:34
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BattleMoose posted:Wwi tank armour was very thin by wwii standards. When they first arrived they were a rude shock. Machine guns could make things unpleasant for the tank crews, causing small pieces of metal inside the tank to fly about and, hurt (?) the crew. Artillery was effective though and so were ant aircraft guns if available. Spalling was a huge concern due to a) not great quality armor and b) no spall liners. Just check out spall masks or splatter masks, which undoubtedly helped prevent injury. However, it just makes being in the tank that much more unpleasant.
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Oct 27, 2016 13:37
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Grey Hunter posted:After reading about how screwed up the armies were in the period, is there a good book on how they went from feudal levies to mercenaries? Or just on the mercs themselves? The armies weren't screwed up though: they did the best they could with the logistical constraints at hand. We don't work a fraction as hard as these people did. Edit: What we are talking about here works for every polity except France; their armies were under government control. For that see John Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siecle; David Parrott, Richelieu's Army. For the part where not having mercenaries was actually a bad idea, see David Parrott's "France's War against the Hapsburgs, 1624-1659: The Politics of Military Failure," in Guerra y Sociedad en La Monarquía Hispánica: Politica, Estrategia y Cultura en la Europa Moderna (1500-1700). Most of the last one is viewable on Google Books. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 13:52 on Oct 27, 2016 |
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Oct 27, 2016 13:48
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BattleMoose posted:Wwi tank armour was very thin by wwii standards. When they first arrived they were a rude shock. Machine guns could make things unpleasant for the tank crews, causing small pieces of metal inside the tank to fly about and, hurt (?) the crew. Artillery was effective though and so were ant aircraft guns if available. These guys? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mWeNNiG9YU They have a bunch of videos on World War I weapons, including reviews of their ergonomics and accuracy. I have a bunch of photos in the old thread that I can repost of a reproduction American WW1 trench. It's in the pristine state a freshly built trench would have been in, but it's a nice ground's eye view of a quality American trench.
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Oct 27, 2016 14:58
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Wow the quality of that post your questions history thread just dropped hilariously once more after Hitler was brought up. When the sufferings of WW1 tank crews brought it it always reminds me of the crews on the first experimental Ironclad monitors as well.
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Oct 27, 2016 15:02
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Cythereal posted:Sometimes goes the other way, too. The US Navy refused to believe the sinking of the Shinano by a submarine because they were sure that a super battleship midway into conversion into some unholy battleship-carrier thing didn't actually exist. Until the Japanese told the Americans yep, the Shinano was a thing and got torpedoed by a sub. Post war, the US Navy had a hell of a lot of surprises waiting for them. "Yeah, we had a heavy cruiser explode and sink while at anchor, we're not hiding it. No that actually is how big the Yamato and the Musashi were; I know, right? That cabinet? Oh, that's our files on these these destroyer-sized submarine aircraft carriers we built to attack the Panama canal." OpenlyEvilJello posted:Might be something wrong on my end, but this link doesn't take me to Part II, nor can I find it from the R100/R101 tag. v Goddamnit...
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Oct 27, 2016 15:19
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Nebakenezzer posted:No that actually is how big the Yamato and the Musashi were; I know, right? Considering that the US Navy had sunk those two, why would they be surprised by their size post-war? Had they somehow forgotten?
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Oct 27, 2016 15:51
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Hard to get a scale reference. It took them forever to realize those were 460mms not 406mms. Umm, the Mutsu was the second Nagato class BB, the best non-Yamato BBs they had. xthetenth fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Oct 27, 2016 |
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Oct 27, 2016 16:03
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BattleMoose posted:Wwi tank armour was very thin by wwii standards. When they first arrived they were a rude shock. Machine guns could make things unpleasant for the tank crews, causing small pieces of metal inside the tank to fly about and, hurt (?) the crew. Artillery was effective though and so were ant aircraft guns if available. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko9A3ZbN8ZU British equivalent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOnhPtqj3Jo For comparison, a bigger AT gun that was developed a bit later by the Finns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9qHv_XEAZg
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Oct 27, 2016 16:10
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Grey Hunter posted:
I'm a big fan of how he describes the changes on the frontiers as a two way street of latinizing Germanic tribes and Germanizing Roman practices.
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Oct 27, 2016 16:44
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Comstar posted:Further to that, why was it evacuated a few weeks after the siege? I thought re-running Dien-Bien-Phu-and-this-time-winning what was what Westermoreland wanted. Good question, I'd like the know as well. My understanding is that it was LBJs call but I don't know why. I believe several advisors recommended staying, because it had pinned a large number of NVA in place. I also believe the Marines felt they were doing fine and were upset when told to withdraw.
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Oct 27, 2016 16:47
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Cyrano4747 posted:My go to on this is Geary's Before France and Germany: the creation and transformation of the Merovingian world. It focuses more on how the post Roman world developed but by necessity includes some excellent work on late Rome and its relationships with peoples on its frontiers. I quite liked Halsall's Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, how do they compare, do they even overlap (describing the frontiers like that is definitely common ground)?
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Oct 27, 2016 16:56
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SeanBeansShako posted:that post your questions history thread link? xthetenth posted:I quite liked Halsall's Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West  It's not the easiest read, as it's basically a text book (and priced to match), but it's quite good. Found myself having to take notes to remember who all the people involved were, and the ethnogenesis stuff was pretty dry, if ultimately fascinating. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Oct 27, 2016 |
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Oct 27, 2016 16:58
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Ensign Expendable posted:The ability to look up Soviet records to compare to German versions of events will never not be amazing. I read about a battle where (as the Germans claim) two Mechanized Corps' worth of T-34s drove into their ambush and 90% of them were destroyed. Actual Soviet tank losses for that day, across the entire Front: 5. Turns out, it was an assault of 5.5 tanks. That lone half-tank barely got away.
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Oct 27, 2016 17:16
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xthetenth posted:I quite liked Halsall's Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, how do they compare, do they even overlap (describing the frontiers like that is definitely common ground)? Haven't read it.
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Oct 27, 2016 17:19
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Those are exactly the guys. Skip to 18:10 for fun times. There is a nice discussion at the end with regard to firing it standing and firing it prone. Speaking of which, what do people think about this channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=user?TheGreatWar Its got a tonne of good detail but there is a lot about them that seriously grate me the wrong way.
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Oct 27, 2016 18:13
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What channel is that? Links acting wonky for me
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Oct 27, 2016 18:31
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PittTheElder posted:link? It's the post your fun history facts thread, I left when a bunch of poo poo posters were pretty much poo poo posting.
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Oct 27, 2016 18:38
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