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aphid_licker posted:Is it significant that there were no chemical weapons used on the Eastern front? It seems like they weren't pulling any punches there otherwise, so is the idea just that it wouldn't have been particularly effective? Fighting on the Eastern front was pretty mobile, whereas gas was best used when you could wait for the right weather conditions because time wasn't the primary operational factor. If you are commander at the corp or army level on the Eastern front, its fair to say you've hosed up if the other guy is so entrenched that gas shells might be worthwhile. Armored formations might be able to advance clean through several lines of defense in only a few hours and your own gas could become more of a delay than enemy resistance. Even at Kursk, a bone head repetition of a WW1 operational plan with WW2 equipment, the Germans made advances of the scale of kilometers per day, not hundreds of meters. As for the Soviets, they had enormous difficulty on the offense coordinating the armored second echelon break through with the first echelon infantry/artillery break in. Adding gas to the mix would always have been a bad idea. As for why gas was never used on fortified cities, my thought is that gassing the population of an entire city was, at a utilitarian level, going to kill all the people who keep it running as a logistical center. Nobody in WW2 had problems with fire bombing civilians because the army wouldn't need the railheads any time soon.
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Dec 16, 2016 17:37
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It's very odd that gas wasn't used against Leningrad though.
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Dec 16, 2016 17:42
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Tias posted:Came to post this. Germ warfare was mostly tested on Chinese villages, but they straight up deployed mustard gas and lewisite against military targets. When I went on a tour of the catacombs, the tour guide said that the Germans tried to clear them with gas, but it reacted with the limestone and didn't work.
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Dec 16, 2016 17:48
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aphid_licker posted:Is it significant that there were no chemical weapons used on the Eastern front? It seems like they weren't pulling any punches there otherwise, so is the idea just that it wouldn't have been particularly effective? The answer to this question is "literally Hitler." Hitler was in several gas attacks in WW1 and just didn't like the thought of using chemical weapons.
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Dec 16, 2016 17:57
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From Wikipedia: Stanley P. Lovell, Deputy Director for Research and Development of the Office of Strategic Services, reports in his book Of Spies and Stratagems that the Allies knew the Germans had quantities of Gas Blau available for use in the defense of the Atlantic Wall. The use of nerve gas on the Normandy beachhead would have seriously impeded the Allies and possibly caused the invasion to fail altogether. He submitted the question "Why was nerve gas not used in Normandy?" to be asked of Hermann Göring during his interrogation. Göring answered that the reason gas was not used had to do with horses. The Wehrmacht was dependent upon horse-drawn transport to move supplies to their combat units, and had never been able to devise a gas mask horses could tolerate; the versions they developed would not pass enough pure air to allow the horses to pull a cart. Thus, gas was of no use to the German Army under most conditions.
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Dec 16, 2016 17:57
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Fangz posted:It's very odd that gas wasn't used against Leningrad though. Russians had gas masks and detection units like anyone else and gassing a city would be harder because they also have air tight shelters and it's a huge area to gas. And then there would be a retaliation, Soviets had a line of T-26 variants for the purpose.
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Dec 16, 2016 18:05
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Hogge Wild posted:From Wikipedia: Is that true or was Goering trolling? I googled "gas masks for horses" on a whim and it looks like both sides were using them in WWI; maybe they figured out that they just weren't good enough, or maybe it was a different kind of gas that made the old masks useless or something? Or maybe google turned up unreliable results, I did not dig very deep
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Dec 16, 2016 18:09
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I think the WWI ones were for cavalry, not draft horses.
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Dec 16, 2016 18:11
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Nenonen posted:Russians had gas masks and detection units like anyone else and gassing a city would be harder because they also have air tight shelters and it's a huge area to gas. And then there would be a retaliation, Soviets had a line of T-26 variants for the purpose. Nenonen posted:Everyone must have realized that there was very little to be gained apart from minute tactical gains. Chemical weapons didn't decide WW1 and were little more than nuisance after gas masks were distributed and methods of chemical detection developed, so why bother? Still they were prepared for it at all levels of military and civilian organization. Chemical weapons would be useful mostly against an opponent totally defenceless against them, like when Britain (supposedly?) used them in Iraq or Italy in Ethiopia. You'd think that Nazis would have used them as a last ditch measure, but there must have been little point in doing so at that point, the response would only have been far worse. Were they air dropped canisters or what did they use? And what would have been used in WW2?
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Dec 16, 2016 18:23
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If you're just gassing the beachheads then wouldn't you just be able to have trucks with men with gas masks cover the last 5 miles to the affected area or whatever? How much gas are you pumping into an area where your entire logistics system can't handle it at all? Hogge Wild posted:Were they air dropped canisters or what did they use? And what would have been used in WW2? Depends on the country, what they had developed/on-hand, etc. The Japanese had colour codes for chemical munitions quote:
and so did the Russians quote:
Edit: I haven't gotten there yet, but the British Explosives book I have has a section on the various Chemical bombs they had on station. quote:These bombs are designed to contaminate an area by dispersal of their gas filling No mention is made on what gasses they used to fill the bombs. quote:Black band = Tear Gas Jobbo_Fett fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Dec 16, 2016 |
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Dec 16, 2016 18:39
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Ensign Expendable posted:I think the WWI ones were for cavalry, not draft horses. What would be the difference between the two for gas mask purposes? It would seem the mister ed theme song lied to me
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Dec 16, 2016 18:46
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Jobbo_Fett posted:If you're just gassing the beachheads then wouldn't you just be able to have trucks with men with gas masks cover the last 5 miles to the affected area or whatever? how much  would be in one shell?ie. how big area would it cover?
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Dec 16, 2016 18:49
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Hogge Wild posted:how much Depends on the size of the shell, but I honestly wouldn't be able to tell you  Also depends on environmental conditions and where/how the shell detonates. A gas shell that explodes in a body of water is generally useless. On another note, the British apparently labelled some of their rockets (as well as US-built ones) as "Chemical" in type. Haven't seen anything to further this, but I did come across two fun rockets. One contains a net composed of 
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Dec 16, 2016 18:55
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Depends on the size of the shell, but I honestly wouldn't be able to tell you Gassing a submarine crew is hard to do but if you pull it off...man
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Dec 16, 2016 18:57
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Ainsley McTree posted:What would be the difference between the two for gas mask purposes? The amount of air needed, probably. I'm not a horse expert, but the work a horse does with one rider and the work a horse does while pulling something heavy are different.
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Dec 16, 2016 18:59
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Ainsley McTree posted:Gassing a submarine crew is hard to do but if you pull it off...man it's easy, just knock on their screen door first
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Dec 16, 2016 18:59
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Horrifyingly from what I remember with the Kursk incident, it can easily happen if things go south fast.
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Dec 16, 2016 19:05
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Ensign Expendable posted:The amount of air needed, probably. I'm not a horse expert, but the work a horse does with one rider and the work a horse does while pulling something heavy are different. I think horses also require a lot of air to power their muscles, so restricting their breathing won't exactly do wonders for making them pull 500 pounds.
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Dec 16, 2016 19:10
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Ainsley McTree posted:Gassing a submarine crew is hard to do but if you pull it off...man Depends on if its friendly fire or not 
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Dec 16, 2016 19:12
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SeanBeansShako posted:Horrifyingly from what I remember with the Kursk incident, it can easily happen if things go south fast. Submarines are a variety of different disasters that haven't happened yet. They're full of plumbing that hasn't burst yet, chemicals that haven't been mishandled yet, and so on down the line.
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Dec 16, 2016 19:13
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Ainsley McTree posted:Gassing a submarine crew is hard to do but if you pull it off...man The cook decides to serve beans for all week.
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Dec 16, 2016 19:15
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Sadly and weirdly it seems the BBC decided that Time Commanders was only worth bringing back for three episodes, despite bringing together most of the old cast and paying for a really flash looking studio set up. This monday is Waterloo and next week is another episode of post Roman Empire battle antics. Well I am super annoyed now.
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Dec 16, 2016 19:16
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All of a sudden I really want a anti-submarine net composed of detcord launched by a rocket for maximum explosive action.
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Dec 16, 2016 19:17
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xthetenth posted:Submarines are a variety of different disasters that haven't happened yet. They're full of plumbing that hasn't burst yet, chemicals that haven't been mishandled yet, and so on down the line. Toilets yet to be cycled by a man not trained.
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Dec 16, 2016 19:22
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xthetenth posted:Submarines are a variety of different disasters that haven't happened yet. They're full of plumbing that hasn't burst yet, chemicals that haven't been mishandled yet, and so on down the line. It shows a pretty stark dichotomy between spacecraft and submarines. Both are traveling in environments totally inhospitable to human life, and even the slightest breach will cause a horrible and likely painful, gruesome death for everyone aboard. And yet the amount of effort put into training astronauts and the money put into their spacecraft behaving perfectly 100% of the time is far more than what's put into submarines.
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Dec 16, 2016 19:30
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chitoryu12 posted:It shows a pretty stark dichotomy between spacecraft and submarines. Both are traveling in environments totally inhospitable to human life, and even the slightest breach will cause a horrible and likely painful, gruesome death for everyone aboard. And yet the amount of effort put into training astronauts and the money put into their spacecraft behaving perfectly 100% of the time is far more than what's put into submarines. Submarines have way more people who can do maintenance and a lot more room for margins of safety. Space craft have to be taken to the absolute limit in space and weight just to work. Also subs have better abort options in a lot of cases.
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Dec 16, 2016 19:50
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Jobbo_Fett posted:If you're just gassing the beachheads then wouldn't you just be able to have trucks with men with gas masks cover the last 5 miles to the affected area or whatever? The Wehrmacht didn't have enough trucks sitting around to defend every potential beachhead with the equivalent of a motorized division, and in fact much coastal defense was by static divisions that didn't even have enough horses to move their heavy equipment.So, given the material shortages of all sorts in 1944, was is it really the best idea to replace HE shells, which are useful in lots of scenarios, with chemical weapons that can only be used in a few specific ways and only with lots of planning?
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Dec 16, 2016 19:57
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xthetenth posted:Submarines have way more people who can do maintenance and a lot more room for margins of safety. Space craft have to be taken to the absolute limit in space and weight just to work. Also subs have better abort options in a lot of cases. Space is way more hostile than the bottom of the Mariana Trench. We just have a lot more reasons to keep sending people to space. 
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Dec 16, 2016 19:58
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my dad posted:Space is way more hostile than the bottom of the Mariana Trench. We just have a lot more reasons to keep sending people to space. Does the respective hostility really matter in practice? Sure, life can survive down in the depths, but humans still need pressurized and totally sealed transport to avoid instant death down there.
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Dec 16, 2016 20:04
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philosoraptor posted:The Wehrmacht didn't have enough trucks sitting around to defend every potential beachhead with the equivalent of a motorized division, and in fact much coastal defense was by static divisions that didn't even have enough horses to move their heavy equipment.So, given the material shortages of all sorts in 1944, was is it really the best idea to replace HE shells, which are useful in lots of scenarios, with chemical weapons that can only be used in a few specific ways and only with lots of planning? Well, the assumption is that you'd stockpile HE and chemical shells and not just one or the other. This is in conjunction with the fact that they'd been arming the Atlantic Wall for ~3 years. I'm also not saying they need to replace all their horses. You're not gassing everything at the beachheads and 5km inland, we're talking about gassing the beaches as they land, so how much of a danger could that possibly pose to "some" trucks being requisitioned for the last mile or two of transporting from stockpile to division rear echelon, etc.
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Dec 16, 2016 20:10
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The horse argument is strange anyway because surely anyone in Wehrmacht who knew what happened in Sicily would have realized that come D-Day, Allied air and naval interdiction and paratroop infiltrators would make transit to the beach defenses quite impossible - even Panzer divisions couldn't make it there, let alone Hermann's horse cart. I assume the story was just another of Göring's drug-addled excuses for failure. Still I think that using gas to defend the Atlantic Wall would have been very difficult to pull off. It's okay if you only need to station chemical corps at Calais or some other restricted area, but to prepare the same for the entire coast would have been a huge drain compared to potential benefits especially since the coast is suboptimal for the use of chemical weapons due to windiness and humidity.
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Dec 16, 2016 21:25
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chitoryu12 posted:Does the respective hostility really matter in practice? Sure, life can survive down in the depths, but humans still need pressurized and totally sealed transport to avoid instant death down there. The most hostile part of space travel right now is still the launch. Space itself is pretty benign because there's nothing around to actively attack the craft's hull. You can collide with something big, but that's a pretty extraordinary circumstance akin to getting hit by a torpedo. There's a lot of poo poo that can go wrong on a sub, but the deadly fail-states are tied to relatively simple mechanical systems like the pressure hull or the dive mechanisms. And because weight is a relative non-factor for subs, these systems are pretty drat robust. There's only so much that a crew can do to gently caress up their sub, and spilling dirty toilet water isn't going to compromise the pressure hull. I don't know how many deadly fail-states exist in a rocket, but it's a lot more. Atmospheric exit is extremely traumatic, craft weight is extremely limited, and every on-board system needs to be sufficiently protected while simultaneously attendant to weight restriction. Since everything has to be a trade-off between robustness and weight, you start walking on a razor's edge with safety regardless of how thoughtful everybody is trying to be. Once we start making orbital shipyards, business will continue as usual. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Dec 16, 2016 |
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Dec 16, 2016 21:38
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If a man dies in space, that's a massive tragedy for the country, perhaps even the world. There's public outcry. There will probably be an indictment to find who is responsible for killing off the best and brightest in front of the eyes of millions. If a man dies in a submarine at the bottom of the ocean, odds are most people didn't even know it was there. It's possible even that you don't have to tell their loved ones the specifics of how they died. At most, you might have to send a cleanup mission to deal with warheads or reactors.
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Dec 16, 2016 22:54
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And, not to sound callous or anything, but sailors are WAY cheaper than astronauts.
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Dec 16, 2016 23:07
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chitoryu12 posted:That's just a training video, right? It looks like those formations would be highly vulnerable to flanking, and the "rioters" are just lining up perfectly in front of the shields even when it means the excess guys in the back can't do anything but watch. Lol yeah that is a fake as hell riot. It's like those demos you see of T90s jumping off ramps while firing their cannons. Or VDV guys breaking cinder blocks on each others' chests.
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Dec 16, 2016 23:40
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chitoryu12 posted:It shows a pretty stark dichotomy between spacecraft and submarines. Both are traveling in environments totally inhospitable to human life, and even the slightest breach will cause a horrible and likely painful, gruesome death for everyone aboard. And yet the amount of effort put into training astronauts and the money put into their spacecraft behaving perfectly 100% of the time is far more than what's put into submarines. With a submarine you can make it bigger or heavier to get it working. With a spacecraft that incurs exponentially greater launch costs.
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Dec 17, 2016 00:15
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chitoryu12 posted:That's just a training video, right? It looks like those formations would be highly vulnerable to flanking, and the "rioters" are just lining up perfectly in front of the shields even when it means the excess guys in the back can't do anything but watch. I think I remember that video being a training exercise, yeah. I don't think it's often nearly as professional (South Korean riot police are often draftees, i.e. inexperienced rowdy young men, since you can serve there instead of in the military) but they do similar things during actual protests. There are tons of videos of them from the 90s floating around, Korean protests used to be intense as hell.
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Dec 17, 2016 00:18
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SlothfulCobra posted:If a man dies in space, that's a massive tragedy for the country, perhaps even the world. There's public outcry. There will probably be an indictment to find who is responsible for killing off the best and brightest in front of the eyes of millions. I think you're mistaking the causative effects here. If space travel weren't so exorbitantly expensive, the public's perception of astronauts wouldn't be so venerating. Submarine losses can in fact be very devastating to public image. The Kursk disaster is a good example.
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Dec 17, 2016 00:30
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Koramei posted:I think I remember that video being a training exercise, yeah. I don't think it's often nearly as professional (South Korean riot police are often draftees, i.e. inexperienced rowdy young men, since you can serve there instead of in the military) but they do similar things during actual protests. There are tons of videos of them from the 90s floating around, Korean protests used to be intense as hell. Yeah, my dad witnessed a few in the 60s and he said both sides were equally super disciplined and super aggressive.
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Dec 17, 2016 00:48
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Koramei posted:I think I remember that video being a training exercise, yeah. I don't think it's often nearly as professional (South Korean riot police are often draftees, i.e. inexperienced rowdy young men, since you can serve there instead of in the military) but they do similar things during actual protests. There are tons of videos of them from the 90s floating around, Korean protests used to be intense as hell. You say "used to" but the bee man thing was only a few years ago and like half the country's on the streets because of Korean Rasputin.
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Dec 17, 2016 01:03
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