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There's a bunch of rimmed-ammo mag-fed guns that were made - I've got a couple fairly recent pictures on my home machine, of a Brazilian cop with a chopped-barrel Madsen. Hah, found one I can access and get hosted!  Once, I suggested stuff like .44 Magnum and .30 Carbine caliber conversions for AK in the TFR IRC chat, and was rewarded with much cursing and gagging.  As for the optimistic Artillery Luger sights, note they had similar ones mounted on Ingliss High Powers made in Canada for use with the wooden stock/holster.
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Apr 4, 2017 21:30
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Hey guys, in May I'm going to be spending a week in Germany. Could anyone recommend cool stuff to do in Berlin?
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Apr 4, 2017 22:38
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Mycroft Holmes posted:Hey guys, in May I'm going to be spending a week in Germany. Could anyone recommend cool stuff to do in Berlin? The DDR museum is good and is very close to the German Historical Museum. I'd also recommend going to the Checkpoint Charlie museum. The Soviet War memorial in Treptow is great if you're into big monuments. While you're in the area, Wrangelkiez has a bunch of good pubs, bars and etc. Try to find the secret anarchist commune nightclub near the river! The Siegessäule has an excellent view of the city if you're into that, and riding a bike from the Brandenburg Gate through the Tiergarten to it is quite nice. On that point, try to hire a bike as riding through the city is very relaxed, easy and a pleasure.
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Apr 4, 2017 23:48
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You can learn a lot of new things from eBay! That is a Soviet KV-1 tank and not a Belgian tank at all
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Apr 5, 2017 00:17
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Mycroft Holmes posted:Hey guys, in May I'm going to be spending a week in Germany. Could anyone recommend cool stuff to do in Berlin? Go to Mustafa's for doner.
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Apr 5, 2017 01:34
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Go to Mustafa's for doner. Man, gently caress Mustafa's. Most over rated doner ever.
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Apr 5, 2017 01:42
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Going to Japan in June. What should I check out around Tokyo Kyoto and Kobe? Himejji is already on my list but I don't know if any good museums are around.
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Apr 5, 2017 02:34
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Ensign Expendable posted:You can learn a lot of new things from eBay! Lol report that poo poo for misrepresentation and see how the CS gang at eBay handles that. Just send a helpful explanation and maybe a reference picture inclusive of at least one Stalin grinning next to tank. I know for a fact that they have nobody on staff who would actually be able to be like "yeah no that's definitely a KV" but the basic fact of "this rear end in a top hat is appropriating the property of the people of the Soviet Union and claiming it's Belgian of all places" should get eyebrows raised even if just for the misrepresentation right there in the title.
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Apr 5, 2017 03:06
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Is that claiming it's a French/Belgian tank, or that it's photograph of a Belgian/French tank in France/Belgium, or that the photographer is French/Belgian? Basically why is Frankreich in the title either?
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Apr 5, 2017 03:13
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What is actually being sold there, anyway?
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Apr 5, 2017 03:29
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Elyv posted:What is actually being sold there, anyway? The original photograph. Photos of rare subjects can go for insane amounts of money on eBay, hundreds of dollars, sometimes over a thousand. OwlFancier posted:Is that claiming it's a French/Belgian tank, or that it's photograph of a Belgian/French tank in France/Belgium, or that the photographer is French/Belgian? Probably just a heap of keywords, that's the only way why "panzer" and "tank" would both be in there.
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Apr 5, 2017 03:32
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Could it be captured and in Belgium for some reason? I don't know anything about how the Germans distributed captured equipment so please feel free to call me an idiot for asking.
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Apr 5, 2017 04:20
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TropicalCoke posted:Going to Japan in June. What should I check out around Tokyo Kyoto and Kobe? Himejji is already on my list but I don't know if any good museums are around. Matsumoto is a pleasant little town with a really cool, mostly intact Tokugawa era castle. Kawagoe is outside of Tokyo sometimes called "little edo" cause they've got a bunch of old school buildings still there. The Edo Museum is great, as is the Hiroshima museum, in its own way. VERY sobering.
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Apr 5, 2017 04:48
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Quinntan posted:Could it be captured and in Belgium for some reason? I don't know anything about how the Germans distributed captured equipment so please feel free to call me an idiot for asking. Movement of equipment went the other way. The Eastern Front siphoned up everything with tracks down to rickety British cruisers and zany one-off conversions. The only things never sent there were utter garbage like tankettes and obsolete French tanks.
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Apr 5, 2017 05:04
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I was reading about the Battle of Cable Street again for the purposes of Arguing Over The Internet, and this passage in one of the references caught my eye:The Hackney Gazette posted:By 1936, Oswald Mosley’s party had been waging a hate campaign against Jews, communists and the Irish in the East End for more than two years, writes Bill Fishman. This makes me wonder, what are the reason(s) that Nazism failed to take hold in the UK? Lack of establishment support? Lack of supporting paramilitary organisations (like a Freikorps equivalent)? There was opposition from the left but Germany had that too.
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Apr 5, 2017 06:16
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The economic situation in Germany in the 30's were vastly different to that of the UK. Promise of jobs, bread and worker socialism drizzled with a bit of "make Germany great again" sounds much more appealing in that context.
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Apr 5, 2017 06:25
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Ensign Expendable posted:Movement of equipment went the other way. The Eastern Front siphoned up everything with tracks down to rickety British cruisers and zany one-off conversions. The only things never sent there were utter garbage like tankettes and obsolete French tanks. Didn't they send KV's to Italy for the planned invasion of Malta? Edit: quote:Additional armour intended for Herkules included 2.Kompanie/Panzerabteilung z.b.V.66, a German unit partly equipped with captured Russian tanks. A mix of ten KV-1 (46-ton) and KV-2 (53-ton) heavy tanks were made available for the invasion and at least ten Italian motozattere (landing craft) were modified with reinforced flooring and internal ramps to carry and off-load these vehicles. Other tanks in the unit included captured Russian T-34 medium tanks, up-armoured German light tanks (five VK 1601s and five VK 1801s) plus twelve German Panzer IVGs armed with 75mm guns. Molentik fucked around with this message at 06:38 on Apr 5, 2017 |
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Apr 5, 2017 06:35
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BattleMoose posted:The economic situation in Germany in the 30's were vastly different to that of the UK. Promise of jobs, bread and worker socialism drizzled with a bit of "make Germany great again" sounds much more appealing in that context. Working class life in the UK wasn't roses and sunshine either: http://www.george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/0.html
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Apr 5, 2017 06:43
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GotLag posted:I was reading about the Battle of Cable Street again for the purposes of Arguing Over The Internet, and this passage in one of the references caught my eye: The state was just much less dysfunctional in every way, and capable of governing consensually. Fascism appears where the state begins to encounter problems insurmountable by traditional methods (mass left mobilisation for example, or economic and social collapse) , leading to an unholy alliance between established interests and the radical right.
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Apr 5, 2017 06:44
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That makes sense, thanks.
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Apr 5, 2017 06:49
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Anti-Semitism was widespread, but never a majority view in the UK or Germany (although 'indifference' was a substantial response of the remainder). We look back through history and define the Nazis by their hatred of Jewish people, but in the 20's and 30's when they were trying to win power they were very aware that virulent anti-Semitism didn't play well with the German public and that part of their platform was hidden behind economic promises for elections. The plan was to win power, then turn the German people against the Jews.
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Apr 5, 2017 09:08
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Another major hurdle for any extremist party in the UK is the First-past-the-post voting system. Usually the best extremist parties can do is pour all their resources into a single seat to try and win it, while in the Weimar Republic there was both proportional representation and a very low threshold of votes to get a seat in parliament. Most PR systems have a setup where you need a certain percentage of the overall seat to be awarded any seat, like 5 or 10% of the overall vote. If you don't meet that, you get nothing. This is to avoid having a parliament made up of multiple tiny parties that can't form a functioning government. The Weimar Republic didn't use a vote threshold at all, which is one of the ways the Nazis got their foot in the door of traditional politics, allowing them to set themselves up as the power brokers in a government coalition. Not the only factor for sure, but certainly one of them.
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Apr 5, 2017 09:54
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Mycroft Holmes posted:Hey guys, in May I'm going to be spending a week in Germany. Could anyone recommend cool stuff to do in Berlin? Stasi museum. It's incredibly well done and absolutely fascinating. Plus the guys that work there are guys that used to work there if you catch my drift.
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Apr 5, 2017 10:02
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BattleMoose posted:The economic situation in Germany in the 30's were vastly different to that of the UK. Promise of jobs, bread and worker socialism drizzled with a bit of "make Germany great again" sounds much more appealing in that context. I'm not sure I agree, actually, the Great Depression kinda sucked for everyone involved, and Germany if anything had a more mature welfare state than Britain did at the time. We're not talking about the 20s and hyperinflation where things really were uniquely bad in Germany. Also, incidentally, one reason why the Nazis didn't get a bigger hold in the UK was that Communism didn't get a hold either. Nazis defined themselves as the opposition/solution to Communism; so, no Communist electoral threat, no Nazi counterreaction. The problem in Weimar at the end was that between the Communists on the one hand and the Nazis and traditional far right on the other there weren't enough people who actually supported the existence of the Republic to have a majority in the Reichstag even if they all voted together. Then too, of course, as noted FPTP tends to discourage new parties forming in the UK, at least long term; generally speaking a new political current will end up co-opted by one of the existing major parties over time. Hence why we don't currently have a left-of-Labour socialist party as well as a New Labour one, and hence why UKIP had a high point of two MPs and is now haemorrhaging supporters to the Tories now that Brexit is a done deal.
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Apr 5, 2017 12:59
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I have some questions about the air war in Vietnam: I'm familiar with the problem of the F-4 Phantom not having an internal cannon at a time when air combat would still devolve into dogfights, and that this was exacerbated by the ROE that prevented BVR missile attacks. 1. How often did this problem actually crop up in practice? 2. What did the Phantoms do when they got into a guns-range dogfight? Flee? Engage with Sidewinders only? 3. Did the US ever try to mount gun-pods on the Phantoms as a stand-in for internal cannon? 4. Did F-4 Phantom versions that already had an internal cannon ever get to participate in Vietnam, or was that much later?
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Apr 5, 2017 13:03
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Cyrano4747 posted:Man, gently caress Mustafa's. Most over rated doner ever. i thought it was good!
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Apr 5, 2017 13:07
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gradenko_2000 posted:I have some questions about the air war in Vietnam: I'm familiar with the problem of the F-4 Phantom not having an internal cannon at a time when air combat would still devolve into dogfights, and that this was exacerbated by the ROE that prevented BVR missile attacks. 1.The problem actuall cropped up a lot. USAF figured that, at supersonic speeds, dogfighting wouldn't be a big deal in the 1960s, so they didn't train pilots on it. What ended up happening was most dogfights ended up being Subsonic, so there was definently growing pains in Vietnam. 2. Disengage and try to get into a position for better firing if all you had was missiles. But the F-4 tended to close up on its target too quickly, so guns were a must in the end. 3. See below F-4 Phantom Gun Pod, it was powered by a Ram Air Turbine:  Shown here on Centerline:  Biggest drawback of the SUU-16 Pod was the lack of a lead targetting computer, and the gun tended to become inaccurate with use requiring it to be boresighted after almost ever use. The US Marines often equipped two of them for Close Air Support. 4. The F-4E eventually had an internal 20mm Cannon mounted. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Apr 5, 2017 |
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Apr 5, 2017 13:20
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Mycroft Holmes posted:Hey guys, in May I'm going to be spending a week in Germany. Could anyone recommend cool stuff to do in Berlin? Seconding the Stasi museum - it's housed in the building that used to be the Stasi HQ, and a lot of the rooms are preserved as they were just before the Wall came down. The decor is very banal totalitarian. Although I'd heard that the guys that work there are people who'd been persecuted by the Stasi, rather than former Stasi members? The Russian memorial in Treptower Park, where the bodies of 5,000 Russian soldiers are interred, is also worth visiting. As a Brit it was interesting to see that grand Soviet style of memorial, which is very unlike what we're used to here. The Jewish Museum is really interesting - it's a really interesting building architecturally, and while obviously the Holocaust is a big part of it the bulk of the museum is devoted more to looking at the Jewish experience in Germany and antisemitism in longer historical context, going back to the Middle Ages. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (you've probably seen it in people's tasteless posed/"arty" pictures on Facebook) is a very interesting memorial to experience and there's a visitor's centre there that I found really affecting. Obviously goes without saying that these are all rather sombre experiences, so for something a little less soul-crushing, Monsieur Vuong's does fantastic, cheap Vietnamese food.
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Apr 5, 2017 14:23
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It's a little ways outside of Berlin (Munster) but the Deutsch Tank Museum is a pretty good experience. https://www.google.com/maps/place/G...05!4d10.1091891
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Apr 5, 2017 14:33
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Molentik posted:Didn't they send KV's to Italy for the planned invasion of Malta? Hahaha, I didn't know about that. When I think "let's invade an island", the KV-2 is hardly the first tank that comes to mind.
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Apr 5, 2017 14:33
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feedmegin posted:I'm not sure I agree, actually, the Great Depression kinda sucked for everyone involved, and Germany if anything had a more mature welfare state than Britain did at the time. We're not talking about the 20s and hyperinflation where things really were uniquely bad in Germany. The Great Depression most certainly didn't suck for everyone in equal amounts though; it was by and large the various government's economic choices leading up to the Depression and their response to it. Notably, the German government attempted a major austerity programme after the Great Depression which crippled their economy much worse than, say, the UK or France. Interwar Germany was also generally poorer than pretty much all of its Western European contemporaries - there was a reason that Hitler had an obsession with the USA and their standard of living in comparison to Germany. I'm not sure the "opposition to communism" theory holds much water since socialists (both democratic and revolutionary) had held power in the German government since pretty much its creation prior to the nazis cropping up.
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Apr 5, 2017 15:09
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Owlkill posted:Berlin stuff I took a similar to Berlin a couple summers ago. Renting a bike is a great idea if weather permits, I was able to ride practically everywhere. The area around the Reichstag is chock full of monuments like the holocaust memorials, Brandenburger Gate, the gorgeous Tiergarten Park which is full of monuments, and several others I can't remember the name of, all bikeable. Also the German Museum of Technology has an excellent aeronautics area. They've very deliberately included only wrecks for the WWII exhibit. It's a pretty striking contrast to the immaculate exhibits otherwise. Also in classic German fashion they have extremely detailed technical information in the extensive engine exhibit. On a nice day go to the Templehof airport which has been converted into a huuuuuuge park. Bring the bike if you can. If you get a chance and enjoy soccer, try to catch a Hertha game at the stadium built for the '36 Olympics. The Nazi rally field is still there (since the British needed a polo grounds you see). I got chills walking up to it since I'd only seen it in documentaries of Hitler speeches.
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Apr 5, 2017 15:29
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MikeCrotch posted:I'm not sure the "opposition to communism" theory holds much water since socialists (both democratic and revolutionary) had held power in the German government since pretty much its creation prior to the nazis cropping up. Better tell that to the Nazis then since that was pretty much the main part of their pitch, and the reason why traditional rightwingers (both in Germany and abroad) supported them. The KPD was the largest Communist party in Europe. It's not an accident that the Reichstag fire was portrayed as an imminent Communist revolution and it's not an accident that within hours of the fire KPD members were being locked up en masse.
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Apr 5, 2017 15:40
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feedmegin posted:Better tell that to the Nazis then since that was pretty much the main part of their pitch, and the reason why traditional rightwingers (both in Germany and abroad) supported them. The KPD was the largest Communist party in Europe. It's not an accident that the Reichstag fire was portrayed as an imminent Communist revolution and it's not an accident that within hours of the fire KPD members were being locked up en masse. Plus you did have that whole thing in Bavaria where socialist/anarchist revolutionaries deposed Ludwig III and started instituting communist reforms and executing right-wingers until the army and the freikorps suppressed them.
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Apr 5, 2017 15:56
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Sorry its been so long since i last did one of these. I havent given up on them just other things have got in the way. Previous posts. Part 1: Historical context Part 2: The Armies, the Objectives and the beginning. Part 3: The Initial year - Saddams assault. Part 4: Iraq is driven out of Iran, 81-82. Iran starts its assault into Iraq, 82-83. Iraq had finally been pretty much ejected from Iranian territory in every substantial way, the retaking of Khorramshahr was the last strategically important bit of land that they held in Iran. This would present a new set of problems for Iran however as there would be a combination of three factors that would make their fight far more difficult on Iraqi land. The first was that the Iraqi soldier was far more inclined to fight to defend his home turf than he was to defend captured Iranian territory, we would steadily see far less instances of the Iraqi army breaking and running from this point onwards. The second is that since 1981 Saddam had ordered the creation of extensive fortifications, especially around Basra and Baghdad, the obvious Iranian target and what would become the focus of war for the ensuing years, the defensive preparations were dubbed the Iron Ring. Finally Iraq was back within its logistical area, it was very able to redeploy its forces quickly using the Iraqi road network and especially the major Highway between Basra and Baghdad, indeed Iran would dedicate most of its offensives to trying to cut this link.  Bagdhad – Basra highway. State of the Armies. Iraq had lost around 60’000 troops in the first years of the war, it had lost around 200 of its aircraft either through maintenance problem or Iranian attack. We do not know reliably how much the Iranians lost though it is likely in my view to be comparable to Iraqi losses, weighed against the heavy losses from frontal assaults we have the capture of 12’000 Iraqis at Khorramshahr and 15’000 outside Dezful. However we do have a little more information of the size of the armies at the start of 1982. The Iraqis embarked on a major expansion program that would bring the size of its army up to 470’000 men organised into twenty divisions by the start of 1983. This massive call up would reduce in acute manpower shortages throughout Iraqi life, they would import millions of Palestinian guest workers to help plug the skills gap. Iran would also engage in massive expansion of its armed forces, the Pasadaran would expand to around 100’000 with the Basij at perhaps 300’000-400’000. It is hard to get a good estimate of Basij strength especially because of its highly fragmented militia like nature, with units raised by clerics on an ad hoc basis. The Iranian army still had not recovered to its paper strength of around 250’000 but because of lack of reliable information about how the purges had affected it even at this stage I could not get a reliable number. The balance of forces was significantly against Iraq in terms of raw numbers at this stage. However they still maintained a significant material advantage and would now be fighting from within its own defences. The fact that Iran was so materially deficient was a major reason I think why they focused their attacks at Basra, the marshes and terrain hampered Iraqi armoured operations far more than Iranian infantry. When they tried to attack towards Baghdad across the open plains it usually ended in catastrophe. Domestic affairs of Iraq. Saddam was deeply unhappy, he would complain that the Iranians were refusing to abide by its rules, he would accuse Tehran of expansionism and would rapidly revise Iraqi war aims: “Despite its military defeat in 1980, the Tehran regime insists on its aggressive stands and expansionist trends.” “We want the peace which keeps our sovereignty and our dignity intact. We are not going to use military force to destroy the Iranian nation and army. This is not our tradition. However we will fight them when they fight us. We will fight them in an honourable way as we are supposed to fight them.” Saddam did however really recognise that at this point Iraq was involved in a war for its very survival, he saw the intransigence of Iran as a result of the religious zeal of the mullahs and at this point took the position that they would have to hold out until they came around to his way of thinking.  Dejails position north of Baghdad. This year also saw the act that Saddam would be convicted of and executed for in 2006, on the 8th of July an assailant would fire twelve rounds from an AK at a convoy carrying Saddam and his security just outside the village of Dujail. He would round up 1’400 locals from newborn babies to the very old, destroy the orchards upon which the village relied for income. All would be detained for extended periods and 148 would be executed. Iraq would start borrowing heavily, its GNP had dropped from 46 billion to 39 billion on the back of falling oil prices and exports. The loans that he took would come to around $1 billion a month from Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Saddam had a policy of guns and butter, where he would try extremely hard to keep the Iraqi people supplied with the necessities of life to prevent unrest. While the loans from the other Gulf States would not dry up Saddam would frequently worry that they would, but these were essential for Iraq to fight and without them it would have been forced to capitulate fairly quickly. The loans gave Iraq the material to throw away while it learned to fight properly. Diplomatic arena. 1982 saw the establishment of Iranian war aims, they would be as follows: Saddams trial for war crimes and removal of him as leader of Iraq, installation of a “proper” (Islamic) government, reparations of $100 billion, return of the frontier to the 1975 agreement, repatriation of 100’000 Shia’s deported to Iran and admission of Iraqi war guilt. There was no term there that Saddam would possibly accept, and Iran had to know that so these terms were essentially a justification to continue the war to its ultimate conclusion. This time would also see the Israeli invasion of Lebanon on the 6th of June in an attempt to wipe out the PLO, this so happened to coincide with the major Iranian offensive against Khorramshahr which fed into Saddams paranoia, Iraq would in a presentation to the Non Aligned Movement say, “We believe there is a true connection and a single plan between the Zionists and Iranian invasion… we wonder how Iran is supporting the Palestinian cause when they conspire with the Zionist enemy.” As you may imagine Iran had a different take on it, they thought that their victories had scared Israel as a wave of Shia nationalism would rise up and create an Islamic revolution in Lebanon and that America had approved this invasion as a show of force against the victories of Iran. Realistically it was a coincidence, Israel had been planning this offensive for months, however this will lead to the creation of Hezbollah by Iran and the start of Iran’s real isolation from the world. I will go into this and Iran’s other covert actions probably in a separate post because it’s both really interesting and wants to be considered as self-contained series of events, for now however all that is necessary to know is that Iran only had one foreign policy implement and that was to attack all who they saw as collaborators. Iraq would try to seek peace through various international organisations, the closest he really got was a vague announcement from the UN General Assembly urging both sides to seek a settlement “including respect for sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity and non-interference in the internal affairs of other states.” The Security Council was busy with the Falklands crisis and nobody was willing to try and make time for either Iraq or Iran as nobody liked either of them that much. Iran would respond to this with a massive assault on the majority Shia city of Basra, this took place on the day of the resolution formally passing and several smaller offensives would also be launched in other sectors. Operation Ramadan and the Dawn offensives. Throughout the year Iran would constantly attack, the largest single attack was Operation Ramadan but they would also launch a series of attacks called the Dawn offensives which would strike all along the front. Operation Ramadan would begin on the 13th of July 1982, 90’000 Iranian troops would assault the 70’000 Iraqi troops surrounding Basra. The Iranian assault was comprised of a mixture of understrength armoured divisions and Pasadaran and Basij militias, the Basij were severely undersupplied and were frequently employed to assault first, to clear minefields and soak up fire, many of them lacked guns as Iran really didn’t have enough to go around at this point and this attack was taking place at the end of a long supply line. Many of those employed in this duty were children as young as 12 some whom ended up as POW’s captured by Iraq. Most of the information about this practice comes from western press members who were allowed into Iraqi prison camps at the time, I cannot say whether this was a considered practice by Iran at the time, all we factually know is that child soldiers were involved in this offensive and many of them were part of the Basij groups that were used to assault Iraqi positions initially. However back to the offensive, the Iranians made several penetrations into Iraqi land and the hapless 9th division would make another reappearance where one of the attacks would take the 9th division command post and perhaps most vitally captured the commanders Mercedes. However their assaults would generally not go well, the Iranians the vast majority of the 92nd armoured division when it was surrounded and cut off by 3 Iraqi armoured division. Poor Iranian communications discipline enabled the Iraqis to enact this and Iran would lose around 300 of its precious armoured vehicles from this defeat and from the savaging of its 30th armoured division. The Iranians would employ human wave assaults throughout this assault which lead to heavy casualties, Iraq had constructed its fortifications well and this battle would lead to no appreciable territorial gains for Iran. The expected popular uprising of Shia Muslims in Basra would never materialise, however it did bring Basra within range of Iranian artillery and they would viciously shell the city. The battle would go on from the 13th of July through to the 1st of August, and would result in around 20’000 Iranian dead with an unknown quantity of wounded but probably around 30’000. Iraq had also suffered significant losses, the 9th armoured division had taken so many casualties that Saddam had the division disbanded and the commander executed. The commander at that point had only taken over command 3 days before on the 10th, replacing the previous incompetent commander, however tragically for him nobody wanted to risk Saddams wrath by pointing that out. However the Iranians very much came off the worse in terms of losses of men and material without real appreciable gain. The Dawn offensives. I’m not going to examine the Dawn offensives too closely because there were 7 of them and none of them were really decisive, I’m going to note the trends in general from the attacks. Throughout the year Iran would launch attacks all across the front from the north to the south. They had some success with drawing in the Iraqi Kurds in the north to attack alongside them and Iraq suffered minor losses of territory along the mountains in the north and centre. It was a lot easier for them to attack in the north and centre because firstly they were much closer to their logistical hubs behind the Zagros Mountains, and secondly fighting in this terrain played to Iranian strengths in infantry as it was hard for Iraq to employ its armour. However they ran into the problem that the second they came down from the mountains they would run into Iraqi armoured superiority which stopped them dead in their tracks. Despite the territorial gains being made by some of the dawn offensives they were a source of horrendous casualties for the Iranians, they were attacking well entrenched forces in prepared positions that were fighting for their home soil. There were extensive minefields, canals and obstacles put in their way and the Pasadaran was still not cooperating well with the Iranian army, so breakthroughs achieved by Iranian army armour units were not followed up in force or quickly by Pasadaran units. They also had the problem that Iraq was beginning to learn to fight at this stage, they would still make a horrendous quantity of howling mistakes throughout the war but steadily less so. Their complete penetration of Iranian communications enabled them to mass artillery behind Iranian attack points and their possession of Iraq’s road network and their steadily increasing amount of mechanised forces in Iraq’s army enabled them to quickly shift reserves around to blunt Iranian attacks. The Dawn offensives were really ultimately a series of Iranian defeats, Iran lost significant forces in these attacks and got substantially nothing forward. They would learn from these mistakes but it would not come for a while. The Dawn operations would also see the start of Iraqi usage of chemical weapons though as of yet on a small scale. The armies in 1983. Iraq had several problems to deal with, it needed to win the war to produce better quality troops than Iran, that was a given because of Iran’s huge manpower advantage. This means that they needed to be educated enough to use the equipment that Iraq was buying. The problem was that a significant portion of the soldiers being inducted into the Iraqi army were functionally illiterate. This was a very large problem for the armoured forces as you can’t really comprehend a tank maintenance manual if you can’t read it and the armoured forces were taking up a lot of manpower due to their size. So Saddam would begin to focus on training combat units, during the winter of 1983 he would rotate brigades out of the front line to retrain in the year, this was a mix of practical training as to their jobs and ideological retraining. I’m going to reproduce the list of “Combat points” distributed to all soldiers. quote:For the review of all fighters at the fronts: precise execution of the points below at the combat fronts will help us achieve victory over Godlessness. Mostly good stuff, but this army has been at war now for three years.  One amusing thing is that Saddams sudden newfound interest in training did not extent to Air command and control, the ATC staff of the Iraqi air force were essentially the rejects from every other department. They were poorly trained and poorly paid, when it was suggested to Saddam that they might entice more bright people into the ATC role by offering better training and pay Saddam shouted the man down. Poor control of the air force would dog Iraq throughout the war. Iraq however was receiving regular deliveries of new and modern equipment, which Iran was not. This was especially provided to Iraq by France for a whole host of reasons including historical ties and also the Iranian foreign policy which I will go into in the next section. Iran was really at this point starting to run out of equipment, they had approximately four major sources of supply in this timeframe, Libya, North Korea, small imports from China and the arms supplied by Israel on behalf of the US as part of arms for hostages. This was not enough to run a war on and their stuff was breaking down. This would really be the start of the Pasadaran being the major force fighting the war as opposed to the regular forces, they didn’t particularly have another option they could take as they were just setting out to piss everybody off as fast as they could. Iran makes more enemies.  As I have mentioned in the past Iran essentially founded Hezbollah, everybody knew this at the time and Iran was knee deep in helping Hezbollah plan its operations. Lebanon was a particular area of chaos after the Israeli invasion had destabilised the country a UN peacekeeping force had been sent in, among which were US and French troops. The Iranian hatred of the US is pretty obvious in its source but their hatred of France really did stem somewhat from the Iran Iraq war. France sold Mirage jets to Iraq in 1981 which pissed the Iranians off to no end, and they were also sheltering Bani-Sadr and Massoud Rajavi, the ex-President and the head of the Peoples Mujahidin who had fled the country and were using the French media to attack Iran publically. Iran would conduct several attacks on French targets throughout the Middle East from 1981 onwards. France had been debating selling the new Super Etendard and associated Exocet missiles to Iraq for fear that they might attack Iranian oil infrastructure and drive up oil prices. However on October the 23rd when two truck bombs would be driven into the French paratroopers and US marine barracks in Beirut, causing the deaths of 241 US marines, 58 French paratroopers and 2 civilians. France released the planes for export almost immediately afterwards and provided significant technical assistance and training to get Iraq ready. The delivery of these planes would mark the full start of the Tanker war. I will dedicate a separate post to the tanker war as its best viewed in its entirety. Iran’s aggressive policy pretty much removed the chance of any International assistance. The USSR was supplying Iraq again, they had pissed off the entire west, China wasn’t going to do them any favours though it would supply weapons if they could pay for it. Iraq had the entire treasuries of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the rest of the gulf behind it to pay for its weapons, Iran had no such luck. Conclusions. Iran has now reclaimed its territory in its entirety and is attacking Iraq proper, towards the end of 1983 and the start of 1984 we will see Iraq starting to employ chemical weapons and the start of attacks on civilian shipping in the Persian Gulf. In 1984 we will start to see the employment of ballistic missiles to attack cities on both sides. The war has now become really total in every sense of the word, there were no rules left that had not been broken by early 1984. Iran had become a pariah state with no real allies in the world. I think this was mostly because the fanatics couldn’t comprehend the idea of any other way of dealing, the moderates in the government were drowned out by the voices of the extremists. Both sides were intransigent on their demands and so there was no hope of negotiation, we now really start to see the beginning of the attrition stage of the war. Both sides lacked the capability to effect a breakthrough and so much like in WW1 they would simply hammer at each other with every ounce of strength at their disposal until one side broke. That would be a long time and an awful lot of casualties coming. Next time - The tanker war. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Apr 5, 2017 |
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Apr 5, 2017 15:59
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Phanatic posted:Plus you did have that whole thing in Bavaria where socialist/anarchist revolutionaries deposed Ludwig III and started instituting communist reforms and executing right-wingers until the army and the freikorps suppressed them. Well, kinda; that was back in 1919 or so, and went along with the Spartacist rising, back before the Nazi Party as we know it was even a gleam in Hitler's eye. Things were pretty unsettled across Europe at the time.
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Apr 5, 2017 16:07
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feedmegin posted:Better tell that to the Nazis then since that was pretty much the main part of their pitch, and the reason why traditional rightwingers (both in Germany and abroad) supported them. The KPD was the largest Communist party in Europe. It's not an accident that the Reichstag fire was portrayed as an imminent Communist revolution and it's not an accident that within hours of the fire KPD members were being locked up en masse. I guess I was querying more the chain of cause-and-effect here, that you probably ended up with strong Nazi and Communist parties due to a generally lovely situation, and the Nazis using the Communists as scapegoats to springboard into power, as opposed to Nazis getting to power as an explicit response to the rise of communism in Germany. I guess you'd have to do a comparison of the various states of the far left and right in European countries and elsewhere to get a good idea on whether i'm right though.
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Apr 5, 2017 16:12
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MikeCrotch posted:The Great Depression most certainly didn't suck for everyone in equal amounts though; it was by and large the various government's economic choices leading up to the Depression and their response to it. Notably, the German government attempted a major austerity programme after the Great Depression which crippled their economy much worse than, say, the UK or France. Interwar Germany was also generally poorer than pretty much all of its Western European contemporaries - there was a reason that Hitler had an obsession with the USA and their standard of living in comparison to Germany. When it's just the poor vs the rich, the masses tend to go socially 'left' and most of the time just accept their lot unless willing to get to deposing of monarchs level of effort. When not talking about monachs, when it can be blamed on "others", people tend to swing 'right'. The ruling class of course wants the normal level of ire directed elsewhere, so points towards someone to blame - "we don't deserve this" It didn't start on the Jews, but of course there's anger directed to WW1 which rouses the family of the dead, humiliation, the returned and unemployed and the hungry. Also the great depression and reparations. There's someone to blame for all this, and these politicians are laying it on others and they seem right! (pun not intended) Fo3 fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Apr 5, 2017 |
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Apr 5, 2017 16:15
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I don't know much about the Weimar Republic, but I do know that neither the UK or US had the sort of hyperinflation that Germany experienced. There's starvation and poverty, and then there's currency becoming meaningless as you have to use a wheelbarrow to bring enough money to buy groceries, and you have to buy as early in the day as you can because in the afternoon prices could have doubled. Also there was a certain amount of failure of law and order that characterized the Nazis' rise to power. It's a mistake to characterize them as just a political movement. They used a lot of violent tactics that just wouldn't fly in places that had fully functional governments.
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Apr 5, 2017 16:28
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SlothfulCobra posted:Also there was a certain amount of failure of law and order that characterized the Nazis' rise to power. It's a mistake to characterize them as just a political movement. They used a lot of violent tactics that just wouldn't fly in places that had fully functional governments. There was a lot of appeasement with the Nazis coming to power: They largely believed that if they 'gave' Hitler power, just as his political strength was starting to wane, they could avoid a Civil War or Uprising. They belived they could control him. They couldn't.
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Apr 5, 2017 16:31
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