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Cyrano4747 posted:French artillery in 1914 was still lacking in some respects. I forget the exact details, but the tl;dr is that they went really deep on having lots of light and mid-sized guns which left them getting badly out ranged in some areas, especially in the early battles on the frontier when they were actually on the offense. The Germans were way ahead in siege mortars for fairly obvious reasons. However, I think you're getting it a little bit backwards. Early in the war the 75mm mle 1897 was superior because of its direct fire capabilities, high rate of fire, low silhouette, and relative mobility - only when the front became more static were its limitations made abundantly clear, and the German advantage in heavy howitzers became very important due to semifixed firing positions and a static front. The 75 outranged the 7.7 and achieved a higher rate of fire, and also outranged the 10.5cm FH 98/09, both of which made up the bulk of divisional artillery for the Germans.
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Jan 6, 2017 21:32
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Phanatic posted:No, it was the British government being *overt* Stalinists. The request for engines came from Soviet engineers, to Stalin, who sent a delegation to England and asked Stafford Cripps for some. Stafford Cripps was an open socialist, he'd previously been expelled from the *Labour* party for being too much of a leftist. There was nothing secret about his Marxism at all and he personally arranged and approved the engine deal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klimov_VK1 dude. It was intended to be an export deal, for money. Rolls Royce tried and failed to collect royalties. Please don't do the American thing of conflating socialist, Marxist and literal Stalinist. Labour was and is full of 'open socialists', its not as damning as you seem to think over here.
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Jan 6, 2017 21:36
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Xerxes17 posted:So the other night I finished Robert Forczyk's 2nd book about tank warfare on the eastern front "Red Steamroller". That was a fun engagement. My favourite part is that, just like with the original Tiger, the Soviets couldn't tell that the tanks they destroyed were anything special until they could examine them.
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Jan 6, 2017 21:36
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'ing the gently caress out of entire armies.
Aside from seemingly constant Panther engine fires:
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Elyv posted:What made the French rifles so bad? Tube magazine was a big one. Primary disadvantages are that it's slow to load as you have to push every round in to the magazine through a loading gate. Box magazines use stripper clips that allow for a complete reload in one set of actions. Gun spergs complain about the ammunition, but it was fairly competitive for the time in terms of performance once the Balle D was developed in roughly 1909. The big disadvantage was that the case design just meant it was not any good for use in a straight-walled magazine like you need for an automatic weapon. The sights supposedly aren't good but I've never shot one so I don't know.
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Jan 6, 2017 21:38
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Ensign Expendable posted:That was a fun engagement. My favourite part is that, just like with the original Tiger, the Soviets couldn't tell that the tanks they destroyed were anything special until they could examine them. And concluded they weren't anything special after examining them.  Germany had good AFVs during WW2, but they sure didn't include anything with a cat name.
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Jan 6, 2017 21:38
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Elyv posted:What made the French rifles so bad? A big part of it was their dedication to 8mm Lebel as their ammo. When they moved over to it as the world's first smokeless cartridge they wanted to reuse a lot of the tooling for the 11mm Gras, which led to the case geometry being kind of insane with a super-pronounced taper. Seriously, google it, it's practically a pyramid. The direct result of this was making the m1886 Lebel rifle a tube-loader. The loving cartridge was so tapered that any internal magazine would curve too much. Tube loaded rifles aren't the best thing in the world when everyone else has top-loaders that can reload a lot faster. Oh, then they developed the spitzer bullet, which was a BAD THING in tube mags. Short version, you don't want the tip of a bullet getting to cozy with the primer of the round ahead of it. They engineered their way around this by putting a big ring around the primer and seating it deeply in the pocket. Oh, and if you've ever wondered why the French were stuck with such insanely curved mags for things like the chauchaut, it's 8mm Label's fault. They had some better guns. They managed to have a reasonably modern Berthier rifle that used a more conventional layout for loading. I'm pretty sure it used an enbloc clip. Of course the crazy lebel curvature meant that you could only have 3 rounds in the internal mag. There was a wartime version made with 5 rounds, but for reasons that I can't remember they only issued them to colonial troops and the like. Really, they were just kind of stuck using the very first generation of smokeless rifles with the very first smokeless cartridge ever developed. Compared to any of the rifles the other combatants were using it was just showing its age poorly. Again, this probably didn't matter for a drat in the course of the war.
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Jan 6, 2017 21:42
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Cythereal posted:And concluded they weren't anything special after examining them. The Puma was legit as gently caress and I will fight you over this
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Jan 6, 2017 21:42
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I am pretty sure the Berthier carbine is 5-rounds en bloc.
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Jan 6, 2017 21:43
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:I am pretty sure the Berthier carbine is 5-rounds en bloc. The 1907/15 is. All the previous models were 3. edit: also the Berthier was kept for colonials, the french foreign legion, and export to allies for some reason. Lots given to the Serbs and Greeks for example. They only gave them to front line soldiers for a brief time in the middle of the war when they ran short on Lebels. edit: The "fix" to give it 5 rounds was an externally protruding magazine, which the French hated for some reason before the war. Even without that the 3 round version had a distinctive potbelly look due to the lol curvature of the ammo. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 21:47 on Jan 6, 2017 |
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Jan 6, 2017 21:44
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Still hated it later, the MAS-36 has just an ever so small little nubbin sticking out. edit: Supposedly troops significantly preferred the Lebel to the Berthier, to the degree that the colonial troops all ditched their Berthiers for Lebels in 1920.
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Jan 6, 2017 21:52
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HEY GAL posted:the british helmet is also far easier to make. the german helmet might be a better helmet but it requires a billion steps, because of course it does Until M1942 simplified the process they also included those tiny decals on them, the tricolor shield on one side and whatever branch it belonged to on the other. Still not as bad as some of the decorations on old Pickelhaubes and Adrian helmets, though. I'm quite fond of the DDR's Stahlhelm myself because it reminds me of the Imperial Fleet helmets in Star Wars. It came to me as a surprise that it too was a Nazi design intended to further streamline the production but never got used, dug up from the archives when DDR needed a new, distinctive helmet design.
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Jan 6, 2017 21:53
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Mazz posted:The Puma was legit as gently caress and I will fight you over this The StuG (especially the III model) and Hetzer were where it was at for WW2 German AFVs.
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Jan 6, 2017 22:02
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Cythereal posted:The StuG (especially the III model) and Hetzer were where it was at for WW2 German AFVs. They're not tanks, though. Also Jagdpanzer 38(t) was a rubbish deathtrap built out of desperation, I'd rather have a Tiger any day.
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Jan 6, 2017 22:25
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Nenonen posted:They're not tanks, though. AFVs are more than just tanks, dude. Which was why I used that term specifically.
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Jan 6, 2017 22:30
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Nenonen posted:Until M1942 simplified the process they also included those tiny decals on them, the tricolor shield on one side and whatever branch it belonged to on the other. Still not as bad as some of the decorations on old Pickelhaubes and Adrian helmets, though. I legit thought it was something from scifi when I first saw it. It does look really cool, though kinda retro.
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Jan 6, 2017 22:55
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Nenonen posted:They're not tanks, though. I was just reading about the Jagdpanzer and it seems that some ended up in Syrian hands... who would ironically go on to use them during the war with Israel.
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Jan 6, 2017 22:56
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skooma512 posted:I was just reading about the Jagdpanzer and it seems that some ended up in Syrian hands... who would ironically go on to use them during the war with Israel. Israel's first fighter planes were surplus Messerschmitts bought from Czechoslovakia.
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Jan 6, 2017 23:00
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Don Gato posted:Wait, that's where that myth came from? My dad used to tell that to me all the time as an example of when "common wisdom" is wrong, I had no idea it originally came from MI5. There is a kernel of truth in it. Vitamin A deficiency will cause night blindness so eating foods like carrots will prevent the deficiency.
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Jan 6, 2017 23:02
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SimonCat posted:There is a kernel of truth in it. Vitamin A deficiency will cause night blindness so eating foods like carrots will prevent the deficiency. It's true if you consider that horses have far superior night vision to us and they also love carrots, ergo eating carrots improves night vision 
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Jan 6, 2017 23:10
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Nenonen posted:It's true if you consider that horses have far superior night vision to us and they also love carrots, ergo eating carrots improves night vision Logic! Also, had a class today on military leadership taught by a Chief Warrant Officer 3. The instructor segued into his version of the hedgerow campaign, which was the 101st ditched their single shot M1 Garand sniper rifles for Tommie Guns taken from Army postal clerks to counter the German forces who were armed to a man with the SturmGewehr 44 which the Soviets copied and made into the AK-47s. Also, the swarms of superior German Tiger tanks were only overcome by the fact that Sherman could be easily mass produced and could overwhelm the Germans with shear numbers.
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Jan 6, 2017 23:15
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SeanBeansShako posted:I like the look of those WW1 French rifles. Were those the ones with tube mags? I think either the french or the brits had a standard-issue tube mag gun some time in the 1890s/early 1900s or something. e: already discussed I am dumb Grand Prize Winner fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Jan 6, 2017 |
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Jan 6, 2017 23:30
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feedmegin posted:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klimov_VK1 dude. It was intended to be an export deal, for money. Rolls Royce tried and failed to collect royalties. Please don't do the American thing of conflating socialist, Marxist and literal Stalinist. Labour was and is full of 'open socialists', its not as damning as you seem to think over here. I'm not. I'm saying the motivation for the deal didn't flow in the direction you said it did. It was the Soviet Union who approached the British government, specifically Cripps (who, again, was a literal Marxist), and asked for engines. That's what set the thing in motion, not Rolls-Royce waking up one day and deciding that there were huge profits to be made in shipping a number of its most advanced jet engine to the Soviets.
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Jan 6, 2017 23:33
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P-Mack posted:Israel's first fighter planes were surplus Messerschmitts bought from Czechoslovakia. And you can still find WWII-surplus Mausers with Star of David stamps because they were cheap/easily available and Israel needed guns. Can't remember if Cyrano4747 had one of those, but IIRC some TFR goon(s) did.
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Jan 6, 2017 23:35
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Zamboni Apocalypse posted:And you can still find WWII-surplus Mausers with Star of David stamps because they were cheap/easily available and Israel needed guns. Yeah, I've got one. There are a couple floating around TFR. They were cheap surplus in American gun stores about a decade ago.
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Jan 6, 2017 23:39
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Grand Prize Winner posted:Were those the ones with tube mags? I think either the french or the brits had a standard-issue tube mag gun some time in the 1890s/early 1900s or something. I don't think the British ever had a gun with a tube mag, but they did spend a while with single shot Martini-Henrys.
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Jan 6, 2017 23:45
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skooma512 posted:I was just reading about the Jagdpanzer and it seems that some ended up in Syrian hands... who would ironically go on to use them during the war with Israel. There's a lot of crazy milsurp floating around the Middle East. My favourite is Hotchkiss tanks armed with British 2-pounders.
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Jan 7, 2017 00:21
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P-Mack posted:Israel's first fighter planes were surplus Messerschmitts bought from Czechoslovakia. Well, the first batch consisted of Spitfires granted to Czechoslovakia by the British government. The later "Messerschmitts" were actually Czechoslovak-made Avias which were de facto renamed copies of German models, but not German made planes per se. Ensign Expendable posted:There's a lot of crazy milsurp floating around the Middle East. My favourite is Hotchkiss tanks armed with British 2-pounders. There are still guys using StG44s in there, I could understand heavy machinery and robust bolt-action rifles survivng that long, but it seems insane to me that these pretty cheap ARs are still working.
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Jan 7, 2017 00:27
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Ensign Expendable posted:There's a lot of crazy milsurp floating around the Middle East. My favourite is Hotchkiss tanks armed with British 2-pounders. When I was in Oman, they had shops with just stacks of old rifles all over the markets. I'm not a firearms guy but definitely plenty ww2 and possibly pre ww2 stuff
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Jan 7, 2017 01:22
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FastestGunAlive posted:When I was in Oman, they had shops with just stacks of old rifles all over the markets. I'm not a firearms guy but definitely plenty ww2 and possibly pre ww2 stuff Hell, the combination of persistent superpower interest in the region and the overall arid-ish climate make it easier to procure and preserve that old poo poo. Sure you can't just leave great-grandpa's old falling-block boomer outside by the door but moisture is moisture.
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Jan 7, 2017 01:55
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Xerxes17 posted:It also casts the correct amount of shade on certain vehicles Don't forget the parts about the Panther's combat debut culminating in calling it the "worst combat debut for any major weapons system in the Second World War" (so many mechanical failures in the road march and under fire and some occasional fuckups leaving thin flanks exposed. Not the way to use Panthers).
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Jan 7, 2017 02:06
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steinrokkan posted:Well, the first batch consisted of Spitfires granted to Czechoslovakia by the British government. The later "Messerschmitts" were actually Czechoslovak-made Avias which were de facto renamed copies of German models, but not German made planes per se.
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Jan 7, 2017 02:50
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How did Yugoslavia break down so thoroughly into the wars of the 90's? The most common explanation I've heard is "death of Tito + preoccupied/uninterested Soviet Union + rampant nationalism", but that's a suspiciously tidy explanation. I'm trying to understand how a system comes so unglued and turns to such bitter and vigorous fighting. I'm definitely interested in the perspectives of people from that part of the world- I know there's at least one Serbian goon who posts in this thread (not sure about other former Yugoslav republics) so any insights or corrections would be most welcome.
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Jan 7, 2017 02:55
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TKS and TK-3 Queue: Medium Tank Mk.II, Medium Tank Mk.III, KH-50 et al, PzIV, PzIII Ausf. A, PzIII Ausf. B through D, SR tanks Available for request:  T2E1 Light Tank M3A1 Combat Car M1 Howitzer Motor Carriage T-18  A1E1 Independent Infantry Tank Mk.I  LTP T-37 with ShKAS ZIK-20 T-12 and T-24 HTZ-16 Wartime modifications of the T-37 and T-38 SG-122 76 mm gun mod of the Matilda Tank destroyers on the T-30 and T-40 chassis 45 mm M-42 gun Soviet tractor tanks 02SS Aerosan NEW  L-10 and L-30 Strv m/40 Strv m/42 Landsverk prototypes 1943-1951 EMIL and KRV NEW  Trials of the TKS and C2P in the USSR 37 mm anti-tank gun  SR tanks  Renault NC Renault D1 Renault R35 Renault D2 Renault R40 Char B1 bis Char B1 ter NEW 25 mm Hotchkiss gun NEW  PzI Ausf. B PzI Ausf. C PzII Ausf. a though b PzII Ausf. c through C Pak 97/38 Pz.Sfl.IVb 7.5 cm Pak 41 NEW  LT vz 35 CKD TNH and LTP (Tanque 39)
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Jan 7, 2017 04:35
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EggsAisle posted:How did Yugoslavia break down so thoroughly into the wars of the 90's? The most common explanation I've heard is "death of Tito + preoccupied/uninterested Soviet Union + rampant nationalism", but that's a suspiciously tidy explanation. I'm trying to understand how a system comes so unglued and turns to such bitter and vigorous fighting. I'm definitely interested in the perspectives of people from that part of the world- I know there's at least one Serbian goon who posts in this thread (not sure about other former Yugoslav republics) so any insights or corrections would be most welcome. Balkan Wars: The Albanian Menace Balkan Wars II: Attack of the Croats Balkan Wars III: Revenge of the Bosnian Balkan Wars IV: A new Kosovo Balkan Wars V: Serbia strikes back Balkan Wars VI: Return of the Arkan Balkan Wars VII: The Zastava Awakens Partisan One: A Balkan Wars Story
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Jan 7, 2017 04:58
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EggsAisle posted:How did Yugoslavia break down so thoroughly into the wars of the 90's? The most common explanation I've heard is "death of Tito + preoccupied/uninterested Soviet Union + rampant nationalism", but that's a suspiciously tidy explanation. I'm trying to understand how a system comes so unglued and turns to such bitter and vigorous fighting. I'm definitely interested in the perspectives of people from that part of the world- I know there's at least one Serbian goon who posts in this thread (not sure about other former Yugoslav republics) so any insights or corrections would be most welcome. I don't want to get too into detail because the story is extremely complicated and would take a very extended post. For Yugoslavia the question is not so much why it broke apart but rather what kept it together until it broke apart. Yugoslavia was invented by the Treaty of Versailles and the people who were shoehorned into did not really share a national identity in any meaningful sense. You could argue that the initial name of the state was an illustration of this: Yugoslavia was a later neologism, and for a decade after Versailles it was the "Kingdom of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs." Different groups contained within Serbia broadly spoke similar languages but were usually separated by religion and about a thousand years of history. They were put together in one state, basically under Serb leadership, to reward the Kingdom of Serbia for having been on the right side of WWI, and because actual national self-determination would have produced untidy borders and small, weak states. The victors of Versailles wanted to ensure that there would be strong states in Central Europe to act as a check on German resurgence or the expansion of Communism from the USSR. This is similar to the motivation for combining the Czechs and Slovaks into one national state--separate peoples who were "close enough" to be bundled in one state, which would then be large and strong enough to stand on its own. In Yugoslavia result was a very unstable state riven by ethno-nationalist tensions, most significantly between Serbs and Croats. Violence between groups was frequent and shocking. In 1928 a radical Serb MP assassinated the leader of the Croatian nationalists in the middle of a Parliamentary session. In 1932 the king was assassinated by a conspiracy of Croatian fascists (the Ustashe) and Macedonian/Bulgarian separatists. Uprisings and riots were also common. This was not a very stable country, and things got much worse during WWII. Yugoslavia was under Axis occupation but actually spent the war engaged in a full-blown civil war full of ethnic cleansing and brutal atrocities. During the War, the Communist Partisans under the leadership of Tito emerged as the most effective resistance to the Axis and secured recognition as such from not only the USSR but also the USA and UK. They were able to crush the Serbian nationalist Chetniks and the Croatian nationalist Ustashe and finally, with Soviet assistance, forced the Germans to withdraw from Yugoslavia. It was after WWII that Yugoslavia actually began to function as something like a stable country. This was accomplished through a combination of authoritarian repression of political dissent plus a federal system that permitted expressions of ethnic difference (though not so much for Albanians, AFAIK). Tito probably decided to permit national difference from some combination of genuine internationalism (as a Marxist), political pragmatism (recognizing that efforts to force unity would backfire), and his own heritage as a child of a mixed marriage. Tito's system worked well during his lifetime, in part because he broke with the USSR and pursued a more balanced socialist policy that allowed for more engagement with the West and greater market flexibility--both of which fostered economic growth. However, TIto's authoritarianism only papered over the existing divisions within Yugoslavia. The fissures were still there, under the surface, and they had been evident from time to time even with a popular dictator in place. e.g. protests by mostly Croatian autonomists forced Tito to issue a new constitution in 1974 that surrendered some control to Yugoslavia's constitutive Republics. In the absence of the strong man who had forced compliance through his personal popular appeal and force of personality, his successors tried to work out power-sharing arrangements to balance the interests of competing groups within Yugoslavia. This didn't last. Once Tito was gone it all began to crack up, gradually at first and then with brutal abruptness. The main thing to see is that the apparent stability of postwar Yugoslavia disguised underlying conditions of instability. This is not to say that the Yugoslav Wars were a historical inevitability. Just that the conditions that gave rise to them didn't go away, and it took a continuous effort of management to keep them under control. Tito's force of personality and national reputation was a big part of that, but there were other contingent issues. The power-sharing regime came under economic and political pressure because of the decline of Communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as a global economic recession in the late 1980s-early 1990s. The different republics stopped working together and federal cooperation gave way to a power vacuum. Serb nationalists under Milosevic tried to seize control. Everybody else reacted by heading toward the exit, and that put into motion a brutal civil war over who would have control over which parts of the former Yugoslavia.
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Jan 7, 2017 05:23
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Schenck v. U.S. posted:I don't want to get too into detail because the story is extremely complicated and would take a very extended post. I'm still a beginner to the history of this part of the world- this is helpful, thank you! You also mentioned Czechoslovakia in passing, which I had also meant to bring up; namely, why it was able to split into two countries without bloodshed, while Yugoslavia was not. And if the fault lines between the constituent peoples were really that deep, how were they ever united in the first place- I should have guessed WW1. The more I learn about it, the more it seems the Versailles negotiations were astonishingly short-sighted. Is it a 20/20 hindsight thing and everything seemed to make perfect sense at the time, or was there doubt even then?
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Jan 7, 2017 06:07
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EggsAisle posted:I'm still a beginner to the history of this part of the world- this is helpful, thank you! You also mentioned Czechoslovakia in passing, which I had also meant to bring up; namely, why it was able to split into two countries without bloodshed, while Yugoslavia was not. And if the fault lines between the constituent peoples were really that deep, how were they ever united in the first place- I should have guessed WW1. The more I learn about it, the more it seems the Versailles negotiations were astonishingly short-sighted. Is it a 20/20 hindsight thing and everything seemed to make perfect sense at the time, or was there doubt even then? It depends - some people were blithely confident it would all work out, some people thought there were a bunch of issues but that the world was genuinely in a better position than 1914, and some people predicted it was all going to go to hell. (This is obviously really simplified) In general, the people who were real experts on each individual location at issue in the treaty knew that not all the groups in their area would be happy, but the goal of the conference was to get a treaty that all the Allies could sign on to and between Italy, France, the US, England, and many more involved countries all having totally different agendas it was bound to be an imperfect result. If you're interested in reading about Versailles I highly recommend Paris 1919 which does a great job of presenting the motivations and agendas of many of the participants at the time and how difficult the process of even getting a treaty was.
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Jan 7, 2017 06:50
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Ensign Expendable posted:There's a lot of crazy milsurp floating around the Middle East. . 
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Jan 7, 2017 09:12
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Schenck v. U.S. posted:I don't want to get too into detail because the story is extremely complicated and would take a very extended post. Without getting into politics of the rest of the collapse of Yugoslavia (I won't talk about the war in this thread) - Holy poo poo, you're incredibly wrong. This is literally you making GBS threads out nationalist propaganda that was popular during the collapse.
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Jan 7, 2017 10:27
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my dad posted:Without getting into politics of the rest of the collapse of Yugoslavia (I won't talk about the war in this thread) - Holy poo poo, you're incredibly wrong. This is literally you making GBS threads out nationalist propaganda that was popular during the collapse. You can't just say that, explain.
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Jan 7, 2017 11:33
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