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Rodrigo Diaz posted:I'd like to point out that this guy is not a 30 years war soldier, but a soldier of the Italian Wars, a vastly more interesting set of conflicts with better outfits. Phallic metaphors with weaponry are nothing new, but goddamn look at that sword. 
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Dec 15, 2016 13:47
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Sigh. Let's do this, I guess... "Is that a zweihander, or are you just happy to see me?"
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Dec 15, 2016 14:02
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chitoryu12 posted:In general, the whole reason poor whites support the modern Republican party despite it working directly against their interests almost 100% of the time is because the wealthy whites at the top of the heap directed their fears and anger at blacks and immigrants instead. It's not the rich people keeping you down! It's those dirty dark-skinned people taking your jobs and robbing your stores! Vote for us to get rid of them and live your life! That's not uniquely Republican by any stretch of the imagination
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Dec 15, 2016 14:03
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:That's not uniquely Republican by any stretch of the imagination I don't want to turn this into D&D, but yeah, pretty much this.
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Dec 15, 2016 15:17
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Hey thread, my dad visited Bratislava, Prague, and Vienna this year, and I wanted to get him some books on that general part of Europe for Christmas since he came back with a bunch of questions. Any good recs for the HRE or the Hapsburgs?
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Dec 15, 2016 16:11
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the JJ posted:Ah, but you see, without someone there supervising, the slaves would get out of control! $300 bucks, what a deal!
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Dec 15, 2016 16:44
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howe_sam posted:Hey thread, my dad visited Bratislava, Prague, and Vienna this year, and I wanted to get him some books on that general part of Europe for Christmas since he came back with a bunch of questions. Any good recs for the HRE or the Hapsburgs? 
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Dec 15, 2016 17:09
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Ensign Expendable posted:Do they also naturally develop pikes and poofy pants? John Brown hoped that his raid on Harper's Ferry would lead to a massive slave rebellion, and he actually ordered 1000 pikes to equip the expected rebel army. According the link he had trouble covering the costs, but he was eventually able to pay for 954 and stockpile them near the arsenal, where they were sitting when the slave army didn't rise up. We can also quibble over whether or not they were actually pikes, since they were only 6 feet long and probably closer in design to a boar spear than to a true pike. No idea about the pants, though.
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Dec 15, 2016 17:23
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Pikes are kinda the constant of milhist. Didn't the British home guard order a bunch of pikes just so they wouldn't be unarmed in case Sealion went down?
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Dec 15, 2016 17:40
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Couldn't they just round up stuffy country gentlemen with their hunting rifles and such? They wouldn't have support weapons, but neither would the Germans.
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Dec 15, 2016 17:42
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Tias posted:Pikes are kinda the constant of milhist. Didn't the British home guard order a bunch of pikes just so they wouldn't be unarmed in case Sealion went down? I think the Home Guard got the pikes after a government official said something along the lines of "we need enough to arm our home guard reserves at home, even with only a spear," and a weapons manufacturer took him at his word. If I remember right, the Home Guard were not sanguine about the idea--"They've got rifles, we've got pikes, we are so dead," etc.
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Dec 15, 2016 17:43
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Davin Valkri posted:I think the Home Guard got the pikes after a government official said something along the lines of "we need enough to arm our home guard reserves at home, even with only a spear," and a weapons manufacturer took him at his word. If I remember right, the Home Guard were not sanguine about the idea--"They've got rifles, we've got pikes, we are so dead," etc. Churchill himself wrote "every man must have a weapon of some sort, be it only a mace or a pike." as a joke. The secretary of state for war defended it by saying the pike was "a most effective and silent weapon".
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Dec 15, 2016 18:16
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Stonewall Jackson and at least one governor went so far as to actually order pikes for confederate armies during the ACW. I don't think they ever got used though. Longstreet rather famously made fun of this at some point post war and this got lumped into the mythology of him being an overly cautious and defensive minded commander, nevermind the outcome of an authentic pike-charge versus a formation armed with rifled muskets.
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Dec 15, 2016 18:58
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So why didn't Britain cave under during the Blitz? Is it really a case of the stiff upper lip brits resisting tyranny, aided by their god-like RAF pilots?
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Dec 15, 2016 19:15
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Same reason Germany didn't probably, it just makes people pissed people off at whoever is doing the bombing. The one example of it working is in the Netherlands, but they already thought believed they were facing imminent military defeat anyway.
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Dec 15, 2016 19:27
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Same reason Germany didn't probably, it just makes people pissed people off at whoever is doing the bombing. The one example of it working is in the Netherlands, but they already thought believed they were facing imminent military defeat anyway. I think it helps that Britain wasn't really in danger of an outright invasion. The bombing was bad, yes, but Germany wasn't making landfall with anything more than spies. There was little risk of the country actually falling to the Germans, especially when they had US aid coming in.
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Dec 15, 2016 19:31
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turn it up TURN ME ON posted:So why didn't Britain cave under during the Blitz? Is it really a case of the stiff upper lip brits resisting tyranny, aided by their god-like RAF pilots? Strategic bombing campaigns seldom if ever manage to do that. Britain wasn't the only country that got bombed during WW2, most European nations got their fair share of the fun, Germany in particular. I think Japan was the only one that surrendered as a direct result and even then it happened in tandem with the supply of the home islands getting impossible due to subs and mines, Soviets attacking Manchuria and that way also crushing the dream of Soviet-brokered peace, etc. and even then they almost decided to keep zen and carry on. e: and the Netherlands, but for them too the game was already over so there was little point in continuing Nenonen fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 19:33
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chitoryu12 posted:I think it helps that Britain wasn't really in danger of an outright invasion. The bombing was bad, yes, but Germany wasn't making landfall with anything more than spies. There was little risk of the country actually falling to the Germans, especially when they had US aid coming in. We know this now, but how well was it known in contemporary Britain? Fog of war and all that.
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Dec 15, 2016 19:33
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chitoryu12 posted:I think it helps that Britain wasn't really in danger of an outright invasion. The bombing was bad, yes, but Germany wasn't making landfall with anything more than spies. There was little risk of the country actually falling to the Germans, especially when they had US aid coming in. British people at the time didn't know that though.
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Dec 15, 2016 19:33
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Davin Valkri posted:We know this now, but how well was it known in contemporary Britain? Fog of war and all that. Brits are so used to fog they can see through it like bats.
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Dec 15, 2016 19:35
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Koramei posted:British people at the time didn't know that though. Regardless, it didn't make them cower in fear. They started making preparations to resist. The Blitz strengthened British resolve, if anything.
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Dec 15, 2016 19:40
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Nenonen posted:Strategic bombing campaigns seldom if ever manage to do that. Britain wasn't the only country that got bombed during WW2, most European nations got their fair share of the fun, Germany in particular. I think Japan was the only one that surrendered as a direct result and even then it happened in tandem with the supply of the home islands getting impossible due to subs and mines, Soviets attacking Manchuria and that way also crushing the dream of Soviet-brokered peace, etc. and even then they almost decided to keep zen and carry on. The two atomic bombs also factored into this I imagine...
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Dec 15, 2016 19:49
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This site is pretty interesting: http://bombsight.org/ Shame it only covers London. I imagine it'd be pretty much impossible to give the same level of detail for German cities, given how much heavier the Allied bombing was.
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Dec 15, 2016 19:53
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Nenonen posted:Strategic bombing campaigns seldom if ever manage to do that. Britain wasn't the only country that got bombed during WW2, most European nations got their fair share of the fun, Germany in particular. I think Japan was the only one that surrendered as a direct result and even then it happened in tandem with the supply of the home islands getting impossible due to subs and mines, Soviets attacking Manchuria and that way also crushing the dream of Soviet-brokered peace, etc. and even then they almost decided to keep zen and carry on. Also Japan was hit with weapons of unprecedented destructive ability that they had no way of knowing where in vanishingly short supply. It might've been made up, but I think the Empire was working with the assumption they were just going to lose a city every week until the war ended.
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Dec 15, 2016 19:53
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Saint Celestine posted:The two atomic bombs also factored into this I imagine... They are bombs, which goes into the 'strategic bombing' part. Just dropping two nukes didn't cause the surrender, it was a combination of all the other bombings and everything else that had happened until then. And, again, even then the decision to surrender wasn't universally accepted and caused a coup attempt. Nenonen fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 20:07
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spectralent posted:Also Japan was hit with weapons of unprecedented destructive ability that they had no way of knowing where in vanishingly short supply. It might've been made up, but I think the Empire was working with the assumption they were just going to lose a city every week until the war ended. Technically they were bombed into surrendering though E: f, b.
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Dec 15, 2016 20:07
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It should also be pointed out that decision to conduct the Blitz was a hgr strategic blunder on the Germans part. Previously they had been bombing airfields and radar stations, very nearly knocking fighter command out of the war The switch to city bombing (for which the German medium bombers were ill suited) gave fighter command a reprieve, and they recovered to continue inflicting heavy losses on the Luftwaffe. Remember that strategic bombing is expensive in terms of highly trained aircrew and costly planes, which has to be weighed up against the hard-to-measure impact of city terror bombing.
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Dec 15, 2016 20:09
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I thought that had been widely discredited? It was a close run thing, but if memory serves, even during the air battle phase, the British were building more planes than they were losing, were losing fewer pilots, and still had room to strategically withdraw to if required.spectralent posted:Also Japan was hit with weapons of unprecedented destructive ability that they had no way of knowing where in vanishingly short supply. It might've been made up, but I think the Empire was working with the assumption they were just going to lose a city every week until the war ended. They had been explicitly told this by the US administration I believe as well. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 20:09
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To get a handle on the strategic bombing vs civilians mindset you have to back quite a ways, I think. Warfare in the west during the early parts of the industrial age, was, for the most part, only between militaries. Though there are handful of examples where civilian populations were deliberately targeted, doing so was widely frowned upon and not often done. See the exchange between Sherman, Hood, and the may of Atlanta I posted a few pages ago as an example: even the displacement of civilians was considered mildly barbaric. This rather clouded the views of military strategists as we moved into the 20th century...even in WWI, large scale attacks versus civilians were uncommon, and those incidents that did happen were often major international events with huge political consequences (Lusitania). So, people naturally started to seriously overestimate the effectiveness of attacks on civilians, and underestimated the resilience of civilians to deliberate attack. The end result of this was a line of thinking that, if you could just attack the civilian population, they'd decide quickly they'd had enough and press their government to surrender (or even revolt) regardless of the state of their military. A guy named Giulio Douhet wrote the most influential piece on this; he postulated that a sustained conventional air attack on population centers and production means would cripple a modern industrial state quickly, and since bombers were hard to stop and easy to make (relatively), they represented an ideal investment in future capability. As it turns out he badly overestimated how effective attacks on civilian populations would be, and underestimated how vulnerable bombers would be, but ironically enough the atomic attacks did end up proving him right, in a certain sense. PittTheElder posted:I thought that had been widely discredited? It was a close run thing, but if memory serves, even during the air battle phase, the British were building more planes than they were losing, were losing fewer pilots, and still had room to strategically withdraw to if required. The RAF never had a huge press of plane shortages; their biggest issue during the Battle was pilots, both in number and in quality of training. This is obviously hypothetical but if you extrapolate out their losses starting in mid August they only had about 6 more weeks before they'd have more or less ceased to exist as a functional fighting force without some sort of major change in tactics. bewbies fucked around with this message at 20:29 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 20:25
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I have to point out in a general sense that almost none of these campaigns can really be called intentional attempts to bomb an opponent into surrender.
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Dec 15, 2016 20:29
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spectralent posted:Also Japan was hit with weapons of unprecedented destructive ability that they had no way of knowing where in vanishingly short supply. It might've been made up, but I think the Empire was working with the assumption they were just going to lose a city every week until the war ended. They knew what the bomb was, and, must we assume, how difficult to make. When captured Japanese physicists heard about the Nagasaki bombing, they initially did not believe it was possible.
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Dec 15, 2016 20:39
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Tias posted:They knew what the bomb was, and, must we assume, how difficult to make. When captured Japanese physicists heard about the Nagasaki bombing, they initially did not believe it was possible. That reminds me of a story I heard about a guy who survived both bombings; an engineer that lived in Nagasaki. His engineer buddies didn't believe his story about how the city was destroyed by a single bomb; after all, do you know how big a conventional bomb would have to be to make that big an explosion? They were sitting down with pens and paper trying to figure it out, when out the window he saw another plane flying by...
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Dec 15, 2016 21:13
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Tias posted:They knew what the bomb was, and, must we assume, how difficult to make. When captured Japanese physicists heard about the Nagasaki bombing, they initially did not believe it was possible. Ironically, this makes it sound more credible to me; if you know a thing is virtually impossible to make, and someone's got two of them, it starts to look less like a lucky break and more like the production lines are just gearing up. EDIT: I mean hell, maybe my gut feel's wrong, but I hardly know how seriously it was believed that the US really was just going to start systemically levelling Japan until they surrendered. spectralent fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Dec 15, 2016 |
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Dec 15, 2016 21:43
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spectralent posted:Ironically, this makes it sound more credible to me; if you know a thing is virtually impossible to make, and someone's got two of them, it starts to look less like a lucky break and more like the production lines are just gearing up. The US had basically run out of cities to bomb by the time they got around to drop the first nuke There's a pretty cool graph on this that I can't find right now.
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Dec 15, 2016 21:56
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bewbies posted:Warfare in the west during the early parts of the industrial age, was, for the most part, only between militaries. Though there are handful of examples where civilian populations were deliberately targeted, doing so was widely frowned upon and not often done. See the exchange between Sherman, Hood, and the may of Atlanta I posted a few pages ago as an example: even the displacement of civilians was considered mildly barbaric. Not criticizing, just asking for clarification: I assume that by "in the west" and "for the most part," you mean to exclude wars against indigenous peoples.
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Dec 15, 2016 23:01
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:I'd like to point out that this guy is not a 30 years war soldier, but a soldier of the Italian Wars, a vastly more interesting set of conflicts with better outfits. Nice to see Cupid replacing his bow with a bow-shaped matchlock.
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Dec 15, 2016 23:17
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:I'd like to point out that this guy is not a 30 years war soldier, but a soldier of the Italian Wars, a vastly more interesting set of conflicts with better outfits. Is that woman Victory?
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Dec 15, 2016 23:39
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aphid_licker posted:The US had basically run out of cities to bomb by the time they got around to drop the first nuke To the point where they were specifically preserving certain cities just so that they could eventually be used as atomic bomb targets. bewbies posted:The RAF never had a huge press of plane shortages; their biggest issue during the Battle was pilots, both in number and in quality of training. This is obviously hypothetical but if you extrapolate out their losses starting in mid August they only had about 6 more weeks before they'd have more or less ceased to exist as a functional fighting force without some sort of major change in tactics. To get at the most obvious point of failure in the hypothetical, were German losses any more sustainable? I would think they would be having an even harder time fighting over enemy territory, but I don't know what the relative manpower pools of the RAF and Luftwaffe looked like.
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Dec 15, 2016 23:46
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The RAF probably would have withdrawn north before being annihilated- they could certainly have operated out of safer airbases at the cost of the Luftwaffe getting some raids through unmolested.
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Dec 15, 2016 23:50
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So this is probably pretty common knowledge in this thread, but my friend asked me this and I didn't really have an answer: why was there no(large scale?) deployment of chemical/biological weapons in WW2? The technology has existed since WW1, after all.
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Dec 16, 2016 00:12
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