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Nebakenezzer posted:When I want to imagine Canada taking a Brighter turn, I imagine a Queen or King coming to Canada and using her official residence here, because they are pissed off about the state of things Except it would be Charles doing all that and lol he'll gently caress it up somehow.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 17:03 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 02:10 |
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Have you read or encountered "This Vast Southern Empire"? I picked it up the other week and a lot of its argument centers around how slavery was seen by its supporters as the future of the US economy, in a kind of triumphalist narrative. I heard about it from Matt Karp going on a podcast I subscribe to and I've been meaning to read it, but I haven't got around to it. MikeCrotch posted:Imagine if people understood insectbourne diseases at that time and used mosquito nets, you could have had the deaths of a whole bunch of slaves prevented by their owners providing these nePFFFFFFFFFhhahahahahahahahahahaha, sorry man, couldn't keep a straight face there. That kind of project really depended on a combination of mosquito nets, vaccination/prophylaxis, chemical extermination of larvae, and environmental engineering (reducing the breeding area for mosquitos) that wasn't really feasible until the 20th century, really. Look at the construction of the Panama Canal for an example. If the same knowledge and means had been available and economical in Saint-Domingue the French would certainly have taken advantage. They were there to make money, after all.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 17:14 |
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Doctors not bleeding people to death didn't hurt either. Though I guess they at least didn't usually try that miracle cure on slaves.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 17:42 |
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This is anecdotal, only because I can't find the source, but I read somewhere that the portugese idiomatic equivalent to "good enough for government work" is "good enough for the english". It arises from the fact that they flouted the international ban on the slave trade and so had to regularly fool English enforcement of the pact. Whether or not that's true, African slaves in the Brazillian cane fields had a life expectancy of 23.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 19:08 |
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FAUXTON posted:Except it would be Charles doing all that and lol he'll gently caress it up somehow. If the Royals actually intervened when things were going badly off the rails I would respect them more
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 19:12 |
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Jamwad Hilder posted:I've read this as well. It's very good, if anyone is on the fence. Wait were you at the launch
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 19:13 |
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Wait were you at the launch Nah, I was out of town but I wanted to go. I heard his episode on Chapo Trap House and ended up picking it up a few weeks later.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 19:20 |
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Baron Porkface posted:This has more to do with a chaotic DIY Bronze Age financial system than actual spending. Also the British sabotaged the nascent Revolutionary financial system by flooding it with counterfeits.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 19:22 |
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Baron Porkface posted:Would it be illegal for Prince Harry and the Duke of Norfolk to raise armies and hit each other with swords? Yes.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 19:23 |
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Nebakenezzer posted:When I want to imagine Canada taking a Brighter turn, I imagine a Queen or King coming to Canada and using her official residence here, because they are pissed off about the state of things You laugh, but the Governor General can (and has) prorogue Parliament on behalf of the Queen.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 19:24 |
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Nebakenezzer posted:If the Royals actually intervened when things were going badly off the rails I would respect them more That has not historically gone very well for monarchs, especially not ones named Charles.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 19:27 |
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Beyond slaves, there was also just a problem in general of Europeans dying in droves whenever they sent new men over to tropical colonies. It's part of why Napoleon couldn't retake Haiti. They did vaccinate slaves when they figured out vaccines, but that had purposes beyond just their health like human experimentation. There was one trick they had where to take vaccines across the sea in an age before refrigeration, they used slaves to perpetuate the vaccine. They'd inoculate one at the start, then after the first ran its course, they'd harvest the vaccine from him and use it to inoculate the next and the next until the vaccine made it across the sea. As for the concentration camps, I imagine that the most profitable parts of oppressing those people was over and done with, and while the slave labor did come in handy, it was mostly busywork while the Nazis were waiting for them to shuffle off this mortal coil. There's something weirdly comforting about even in the darkest moments of humanity full of diehard dedication to this plan to exterminate humans, they'll still drag their heels about doing it.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 19:38 |
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Tias posted:One thing that stuck out in Trin's excellent ongoing WW1 wargame, is how absolutely huge a pain in the rear end it is to maneuver within cities. I'm not sure how much there actually was, I think it mainly revolved around villages and towns, at least between Britain and Germany which is where my knowledge resides. Doctrine on both sides suggested building trench lines a few hundred metres in front of any form of terrain because it's a less obvious target, and I assume this was true on other fronts too. From my archival research I did a couple of years ago on the Battle of the Somme, village fighting was definitely a thing and was pretty rough, although as you might imagine it's all WW1 at the end of the day so it's not a lot worse than any other fighting. From an Infantry Brigade report about a village assault, they went in with 84 Officers and 2,570 men and came out the other side with 23 Officers and 1315 men (and the village). This was considered a successful attack. From a Tactical Notes document from around the same period, about how villages were defended: quote:Defended Village I have a whole bunch of this stuff if anyone's interested in British tactics on the Somme by the way.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 19:42 |
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The thing about large towns and cities is that while they're a gigantic pain in the arse to directly attack, especially if they happen to have forts around them, it's also relatively simple in open warfare to just march round them and cut them off, at which point they become a giant prison camp and you're forcing the defenders to decide whether losing X men for Y days, with no guarantee that you can necessarily break the siege, is better than just loving off and finding some less precarious location to defend. The thing about my game is it's all far too short-term and small-scale and has no modelling of logistics beyond what I'm house-ruling in, to bring out the difficulties of sustaining the defenders in a siege (hi, Edward Mousley, enjoy your prison camp, hope you can find a chess set and a decent meal). See up there, where it says "water and four days' rations"? Once that runs out and your ammunition gets low, you're hosed. Then trench warfare begins, and now any kind of visible structure in the front line is an immediate PLEASE DELIVER SHELLS HERE sign that both sides can read and understand, so the real value of villages is if they're a mile or more to the rear. Now you can house men there while they rest, in relative safety/warmth/dryness (Louis Barthas complains a lot, but he complains even more when he has to sleep in the open air), outside direct observation, and without having to build shelters for them. Sure, you can still have the seven-mile snipers try to hit them, but unless you can actually see the fall of shot (you know what's good for that? high ground! now guess who's sitting on all the high ground!), you've no idea whether it's having any effect or just wasting shells.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 20:26 |
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I was wondering what the point of fortifying a village like that would be when, if I was attacking it, I would see how well fortified it was, and ask my artillery to bombard it until I couldn't tell it apart from the rest of the landscape. Something visible to shell sounds like a nice change for the gunners to be honest.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 20:33 |
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Tias posted:One thing that stuck out in Trin's excellent ongoing WW1 wargame, is how absolutely huge a pain in the rear end it is to maneuver within cities. What this?
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 20:39 |
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bewbies posted:What this? This what: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3809230
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 20:41 |
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SlothfulCobra posted:Beyond slaves, there was also just a problem in general of Europeans dying in droves whenever they sent new men over to tropical colonies. It's part of why Napoleon couldn't retake Haiti. Nah, slave labour was an incredibly important part of the wartime Nazi economy and is one of the major things, along with stolen capital from both German Jews and later, France and the Low Countries, that really allowed them to keep going for as long as they did. The most obvious example was in mining, where slave labour was used extensively. However, for a number of reasons foreign slaves were not fed enough and thus could not do such a heavy physical task properly, a problem recognised by Nazi overseers of mining operations. The overseers regularly wrote to their superiors asking for more rations so they could get more productivity out of the captured workers, but the response was invariably "Well work them harder then." The Nazis shot themselves in the foot in a lot of ways like this, by virtue of just being the Nazis.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 21:45 |
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Baron Porkface posted:This has more to do with a chaotic DIY Bronze Age financial system than actual spending. Could you elaborate on this? My only knowledge of financial oddities in the US is the CSA's weird fetish for harbor fees as a source of national income.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 21:47 |
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MikeCrotch posted:Nah, slave labour was an incredibly important part of the wartime Nazi economy and is one of the major things, along with stolen capital from both German Jews and later, France and the Low Countries, that really allowed them to keep going for as long as they did. And yet we still have nazis
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 21:54 |
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Ainsley McTree posted:And yet we still have nazis
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 21:57 |
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ArchangeI posted:Could you elaborate on this? My only knowledge of financial oddities in the US is the CSA's weird fetish for harbor fees as a source of national income. The revolution largely ran on printing promissory notes and IOU's. Rampant inflation ensued. One of the first big Hamiltonian moments was his promise to actually make good on those bits of paper, which helped establish America's good credit in the world. On the other hand, all his buddies rather suspiciously bought up 'worthless' bits of paper at well before face value right before he did this.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 22:11 |
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If the South had managed to borrow money during the war, would the Union be obligated to pay the debt after it was over?ArchangeI posted:Could you elaborate on this? My only knowledge of financial oddities in the US is the CSA's weird fetish for harbor fees as a source of national income. If by "harbor fees" you mean tariffs on imports/exports, that's pretty normal, those were the main source of US federal revenue before the income tax. Ainsley McTree posted:And yet we still have nazis Ironically, the less Nazis are in power, the more sustainable the ideology is, since if they're not in power, their terrible ideas and policies can't come back to bite them.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 23:31 |
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Ainsley McTree posted:And yet we still have nazis That an idea has been refuted does not lessen its charm in the least. - Nietzsche, I think
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 23:34 |
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SlothfulCobra posted:If the South had managed to borrow money during the war, would the Union be obligated to pay the debt after it was over? I think the British actually tried to do that, didn't they? I seem to remember a post in this thread about some government (I think it was the UK) trying to collect a confederate debt from the union after the war and getting laughed out of...whatever building they were in. Unless they sent a telegram or something, then I guess they could have stayed where they were.
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 23:35 |
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SlothfulCobra posted:If the South had managed to borrow money during the war, would the Union be obligated to pay the debt after it was over?
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 23:36 |
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SlothfulCobra posted:If the South had managed to borrow money during the war, would the Union be obligated to pay the debt after it was over? They did borrow money, and lots of it. They issued regular old bonds in Europe, which were predictably practically worthless, but they also issued bonds against cotton, which was a pretty brilliant scheme. They were basically bonds backed solely by a specified number of cotton bales, which was convertible whenever one felt like converting it. The catch was, you had to come to the CSA to get it, which for most investors meant crossing the Atlantic and the blockade. It was still an outrageously good deal and they found a ton of buyers, but a combination of ludicrously high service fees by the French bank issuing the bond and the fact they only required a minimal down payment meant they only cleared a few million from the whole scheme. This article explains it all really well. It also has a cool alt-hypothetical thing: what if the CSA had offloaded ALL of its cotton in 1861, into a stockpile somewhere in Europe, and then just sold it as they needed funds? Had they done this they could have possibly financed the entire war without further funds required depending on whether or not the cotton rotted. As for honoring the debt the US was so emphatically not going to have anything to do with that, they put this in the main body of the 14th amendment just to make things totally clear to everybody: ..."neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void."
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# ? Mar 9, 2017 23:55 |
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[quote="bewbies" post="470174606"] It also has a cool alt-hypothetical thing: what if the CSA had offloaded ALL of its cotton in 1861, into a stockpile somewhere in Europe, and then just sold it as they needed funds? Had they done this they could have possibly financed the entire war without further funds required depending on whether or not the cotton rotted./quote] That would have been one heck of a convoy.
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# ? Mar 10, 2017 00:12 |
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OwlFancier posted:I was wondering what the point of fortifying a village like that would be when, if I was attacking it, I would see how well fortified it was, and ask my artillery to bombard it until I couldn't tell it apart from the rest of the landscape. It is relatively easy to use artillery (so long as you have enough of it, and more to the point, enough shells) to reduce a small village to rubble. It is extremely difficult to be sure of killing and suppressing everyone in the village, and it is also extremely difficult to remove the village from the map entirely; there is a months-long period in which the village is nothing but rubble, but the rubble is still very useful to the defenders. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 01:03 on Mar 10, 2017 |
# ? Mar 10, 2017 01:01 |
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Artillery isn't all powerful. I talked to a dude whose father watched the effects of a massive artillery barrage during the breach of the Syrmian front in WW2. There was such a ridiculous number of Katysha's and what-nots firing that he was absolutely sure there couldn't have possibly been anything left alive in the area that took the barrage, but it turned out that the majority of the German defenders survived, and the Partizans took massive casualties when they attacked.
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# ? Mar 10, 2017 01:08 |
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Trin Tragula posted:It is relatively easy to use artillery (so long as you have enough of it, and more to the point, enough shells) to reduce a small village to rubble. It is extremely difficult to be sure of killing and suppressing everyone in the village, and it is also extremely difficult to remove the village from the map entirely; there is a months-long period in which the village is nothing but rubble, but the rubble is still very useful to the defenders. That reminded me of Montecassino, a prime example of rubble being useful to the defenders, and when I looked it up I found that the details (if true, I didn't dig deeper than wikipedia which I know is bad but I am lazy right now) are even more horrifying than I thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Cassino#Modern_history quote:During the Battle of Monte Cassino in the Italian Campaign of World War II (January–May 1944) the Abbey made up one section of the 161-kilometre (100-mile) Gustav Line, a German defensive line designed to hold the Allied troops from advancing any farther into Italy. The Gustav Line stretched from the Tyrrhenian to the Adriatic coast and the monastery was erroneously thought to be one of the key strongholds, with Monte Cassino itself overlooking Highway 6 and blocking the path to Rome. On 15 February 1944 the abbey was almost completely destroyed in a series of heavy American-led air raids. The Commander-in-Chief Allied Armies in Italy, General Sir Harold Alexander of the British army ordered the bombing. The bombing was conducted because many reports from the British commanders of the Indian troops on the ground suggested that Germans were occupying the monastery, and it was considered a key observational post by all those who were fighting in the field.[9] However, during the bombing no Germans were present in the abbey. Subsequent investigations have since confirmed that the only people killed in the monastery by the bombing were 230 Italian civilians seeking refuge there.[10] Only after the bombing were the ruins of the monastery occupied by German Fallschirmjäger (paratroopers) of the 1st Parachute Division, because the ruins provided excellent defensive cover, aiding them in their defence.[11]
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# ? Mar 10, 2017 01:10 |
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Walls are just rubble in a less stable state.
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# ? Mar 10, 2017 01:19 |
For a more recent example, just see the Syrian Civil War, and Aleppo in particular. Years of bombardment, from both artillery and airstirkes, and much of the city is destroyed, but it was a still huge effort to clear the city, and the final pocket had a negotiated surrender instead of being liquidated.
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# ? Mar 10, 2017 01:22 |
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Ainsley McTree posted:That reminded me of Montecassino, a prime example of rubble being useful to the defenders, and when I looked it up I found that the details (if true, I didn't dig deeper than wikipedia which I know is bad but I am lazy right now) are even more horrifying than I thought: What happened was that the local Allied signals intelligence guys were reading German messages and one read "Is the detachment still in the monastery?" Conclusion? The Germans have occupied Monte Cassino so it's now a military target, no matter how much we don't like the idea of blowing up a monastery. Well it turns out that the intelligence guys were wrong. The German word "Abt" is either an abbreviation for "Abteilung" (a military unit of varying size, usually around a battalion) or it's German for Abbot. The actual meaning of the intercepted message was the German command asking if the Abbot of Monte Cassino was still in residence.
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# ? Mar 10, 2017 01:24 |
The 2nd World War Italian campaign.
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# ? Mar 10, 2017 01:28 |
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:What happened was that the local Allied signals intelligence guys were reading German messages and one read "Is the detachment still in the monastery?" Abbot is masculine and detachment is feminine in German so that is quite an oopsie. "Ist der Abt noch im Kloster" vs. "Ist die Abt. noch im Kloster".
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# ? Mar 10, 2017 02:46 |
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Turns out there's a Russian catalog of all museum artefacts with photographs. Also it's online. http://goskatalog.ru/portal/#/ As per proud Russian tradition, the website is a bit poo poo, but you can probably figure it out. Most of you in this thread will probably care about the "weapons" catalog (click the picture of a saber because you can't link to a specific catalog for some dumb reason. If you want to get a high resolution image instead of just looking at it through their awful zoom tool, you can find it in the Inspect Element tool or whatever your browser's equivalent is.
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# ? Mar 10, 2017 02:47 |
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the JJ posted:The revolution largely ran on printing promissory notes and IOU's. Rampant inflation ensued. One of the first big Hamiltonian moments was his promise to actually make good on those bits of paper, which helped establish America's good credit in the world. On the other hand, all his buddies rather suspiciously bought up 'worthless' bits of paper at well before face value right before he did this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_American_currency#Continental_currency If memory serves, the British captured the plates used to print continentals when they captured New York or Philly, so they were able to mass produce them, essentially making the Continental worthless.
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# ? Mar 10, 2017 03:01 |
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SeanBeansShako posted:The 2nd World War Italian campaign. At one point the US was seconds away from destroying the leaning tower of Pisa so the Germans couldn't use it as a spotting platform.
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# ? Mar 10, 2017 03:12 |
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# ? May 27, 2024 02:10 |
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Has there been any new work on the Dresden firebombing or is it still the "ONLY VALID MILITARY TARGETS WERE TOUCHED, THE REST IS PROPAGANDA" and "LITERALLY SIX MILLION AND ONE REFUGEES DIED THERE, ERGO BUCHENWALD GETS A PASS" fringes with most people saying war is hell and you cannot refine it?
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# ? Mar 10, 2017 08:06 |