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I didn't get drafted, which means I'm just the weirdo who joined anyway. I read somewhere that actually applied to a large majority of people back then? A quick google search seems to confirm that only 20% of the army in vietnam were drafted, but i might be missing something obvious here. I also did find out that the air force had more stringent requirements than the army at the time, which is hilarious compared to my own experience.
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Nov 18, 2017 20:07
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Nebakenezzer posted:I was drafted. I *KNEW* just shoulda volunteered, gently caress! Makes me think of the guy in the pbs documentary who went into the Marine reserves while in college and then went on to grad school in Europe. He said he felt guilty hearing about the fighting on the news every night so he dropped out and went active duty to go to Vietnam. Pretty much every personal story in that got to me, I was only able to watch three episodes
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Nov 18, 2017 20:11
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cool how nobody actually said anything about the contents of the passage
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Nov 18, 2017 20:13
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Kanine posted:cool how nobody actually said anything about the contents of the passage It's another idiot loon equating what he doesn't like to Nazis. Edit: I mean if you agree and think we are part of this capitalist conspiracy defending exploitation of the worker and essentially equivalent to putting communists(?) in concentration camps you can at least have the bravery to say it yourself. Fangz fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Nov 18, 2017 |
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Nov 18, 2017 20:18
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Kanine posted:cool how nobody actually said anything about the contents of the passage Well this is the military history thread not the political ideology thread and the last few pages have shown ideological debate here gets toxic pretty quickly and interferes with pikechat, bomb specs and gay black Hitler so I imagine we’re all not touching it with a ten-foot pole.
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Nov 18, 2017 20:19
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Question regarding the draft (my number came up). Did everyone get shoved into the infantry or were there aptitude tests and such to sort into different roles. I've got an electrical engineering MS. Does that mean I would be working in electronics or something?
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Nov 18, 2017 20:21
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FAUXTON posted:
Joke's on you, I'm 4F. (Joke's on me, I'm 4F  )
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Nov 18, 2017 20:25
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pthighs posted:Question regarding the draft (my number came up). Did everyone get shoved into the infantry or were there aptitude tests and such to sort into different roles. I hope there was some kind of evaluation aside from that. I have an electrical engineering degree as well, and I doubt that over half of my class knows which end of the soldering iron to hold.
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Nov 18, 2017 20:28
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Kanine posted:cool how nobody actually said anything about the contents of the passage The last sentence of that passage kind of highlights the problems with it. When you sum it up by saying that fascism was another form of capitalism it's clear you have a serious ideological ax to grind, and one that's leading you to make dumb arguments. Fascism isn't capitalism by another name in anything but marxist theories of how the final collapse of end stage capitalism will occur. A lot of fascist governments have done a hell of a lot of things that could be considered extremely anti-capitalist. They emerged from societies with established private capital, so that was incorporated into how they did things, but you also see a much heavier hand in the government directing the economy than anything that would be tolerated by the liberal capitalists of a century earlier. Yes, it's true that some capitalists profited under fascist governments by taking advantage of connections with the government or the unique opportunities offered by things like slave labor, but these are also things that happen under non-fascist systems. It's also true that many early fascist parties courted traditional conservatives with monied backers before they got into power (see: the Nazis and the Junkers and industrialists) but, again, that has less to do with any natural affinity of fascism and capitalism and more to do with politicians seeking powerful patrons with lots of resources to aid their rise to power. The fact that a lot of fascist parties rose in an atmosphere of fear about revolutionary communism also helps explain this - Thyssen and Schacht didn't support the Hitler becoming chancelor because capitalists and Nazis are the same thing, they did so because they saw in Hitler a useful tool to suppress the KPD and socialist workers unions. Interests can be aligned without making them identical.
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Nov 18, 2017 20:32
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occamsnailfile posted:Does this thread have a cosensus on Stalin re: the Holomodor or is now a bad time to ask about that? I've heard conflicting accounts every which way, but since we've had discussion of the Bengali famine lately it seems like fair's fair. It's very hard to see it as a centrally directed genocide, that's more or less a dead idea in up to date historiography but not popular consciousness. Cyrano4747 posted:It's also true that many early fascist parties courted traditional conservatives with monied backers before they got into power (see: the Nazis and the Junkers and industrialists) but, again, that has less to do with any natural affinity of fascism and capitalism and more to do with politicians seeking powerful patrons with lots of resources to aid their rise to power. The fact that a lot of fascist parties rose in an atmosphere of fear about revolutionary communism also helps explain this - Thyssen and Schacht didn't support the Hitler becoming chancelor because capitalists and Nazis are the same thing, they did so because they saw in Hitler a useful tool to suppress the KPD and socialist workers unions. And this is a typical story elsewhere, particularly Italy. It's really about traditional power structures in crisis and reaching out to make a devil's bargain. The UK and France had consensual enough governments and enough available state repressive power to just make this a non-issue. Disinterested fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Nov 18, 2017 |
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Nov 18, 2017 20:34
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Kanine posted:cool how nobody actually said anything about the contents of the passage Would you like to advance some kind of actual argument, or are you just going to passive-aggressively whine when no one reads your out of context screencaps?
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Nov 18, 2017 20:34
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Disinterested posted:It's very hard to see it as a centrally directed genocide, that's more or less a dead idea in up to date historiography but not popular consciousness. Yeah, the best comparison is with the starvation you see during Mao's various reforms. Radical restructuring of your agrarian sector with a narrowly political motive leads to some pretty horrible poo poo without actively wanting to kill all your farmers. It's worth noting that in both cases the root cause of it was pretty similar: Both Mao and Stalin wanted large surpluses of grain, both to feed to factory workers and to sell on the international market. Towards this end they gave the heads of the collectives quotas and based promotion on meeting and exceeding them. This leads to these politically appointed supervisors forwarding the quotas plus some extra regardless of what the actual harvest was, which is how you get people sending food forward to Moscow/Beijing while starving to death themselves.
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Nov 18, 2017 20:37
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Don Gato posted:I didn't get drafted, which means I'm just the weirdo who joined anyway. I read somewhere that actually applied to a large majority of people back then? A quick google search seems to confirm that only 20% of the army in vietnam were drafted, but i might be missing something obvious here. From what I understand, the idea was that the US was not going to take troops from its other commands to fill out Vietnam's force, thus the draft was seen as necessary to put bodies in the field there. When you're a Cold Warrior, of course this is an attempt by the Worldwide Communist Movement to take troops out of Germany, thusly, that didn't happen.
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Nov 18, 2017 20:45
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Disinterested posted:And this is a typical story elsewhere, particularly Italy. It's really about traditional power structures in crisis and reaching out to make a devil's bargain. The UK and France had consensual enough governments and enough available state repressive power to just make this a non-issue. France was a pretty close run thing, tbh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6_February_1934_crisis sees the traditional far right (monarchists etc) acting with veterans' associations (i.e. French-stahlhelm) and straight up fascists. They succeeded in toppling a leftwing government and with more organisation I could totally see them pulling a Hitler and getting some form of rightwing dictatorship into power. Hell, that's exactly what Vichy France was, and for all the reasons for its existence it did have genuine popular support from a chunk of the French population.
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Nov 18, 2017 20:46
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7.5 cm Pak 41 Queue: Czechoslovakian post-war prototypes, Praga AH-IV, KV-1S, KV-13, Bazooka, Super Bazooka, Matilda, 76 mm gun mod of the Matilda, Renault FT, Somua, SU-122, SU-122M, KV-13 to IS, T-60 factory #37, D.W. and VK 30.01(H), Wespe and other PzII SPGs, Pz38(t) in the USSR, Prospective French tanks, Medium Tank M7, Churchill II-IV, GAZ-71 and GAZ-72, Production and combat of the KV-1S, L-10 and L-30, Strv m/21, Landsverk prototypes 1943-1951, Pz.Sfl.V Sturer Emil, PzII Ausf. G-H, Marder III, Pershing trials in the USSR, Tiger study in the USSR, PIAT, SU-76, Heavy tanks M6, M6A1, and T1E1, SAu 40 and other medium SPGs, IS-2 (Object 234) and other Soviet heavy howitzer tanks, T-70B, SU-152, T-26 improved track projects, Object 238 and other improvements on the KV-1S, Lee and Grant tanks in British service, Matilda in the USSR, T26E4 Super Pershing, GMC M12, PzII Ausf. J, VK 30.01(P)/Typ 100/Leopard, VK 36.01(H), Luchs, Leopard, and other recon tanks, PzIII Ausf. G trials in the USSR, SU-203, 105 mm howitzer M2A1 Available for request:  IM-1 squeezebore cannon 45 mm M-6 gun Schmeisser's work in the USSR Object 237 (IS-1 prototype) NEW  25-pounder Cruiser Tank Mk.I Valentine III and V NEW  37 mm Anti-Tank Gun M3  15 cm sIG 33 10.5 cm leFH 18 7.5 cm LG 40 10.5 cm LG 42 Tiger (P) Stahlhelm in WWI Stahlhelm in WWII NEW  47 mm wz.25 infantry gun
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Nov 18, 2017 20:49
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That makes sense to me, not that 'common sense' is a good measure of historicity. I haven't read into it deeply but I got the impression that a lot of things attributed to Stalin as 'crimes' are those kinds of failures of policy. Don't get me wrong, he definitely has a lot of actual crimes to answer for, but misunderstanding of policy usage is a common failing of authoritarians. I've actually dealt more closely with the Great Leap Forward and goodness was that a mess, but nobody involved ever intended to cause such harm. That doesn't make it okay but it also means it wasn't some weird definition of genocide. The GLF killed a lot more people than the Cultural Revolution but the people it killed were deeply rural peasants while the Cultural Revolution affected a lot more elites who could escape and write about their experiences, so we hear about that one much more often. It makes me wonder about questions of culpability in cases like the Irish Potato Famine and the Bengali famine though--people outright lied to Mao and Stalin out of fear for their lives. The British regime was told what was happening and proceeded ahead nonetheless.
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Nov 18, 2017 20:49
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I know of at least one example of a draftee (1968) volunteering for jump school, and after graduation, getting assigned to an airborne unit in Germany for the duration of his enlistment. It was pretty random.
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Nov 18, 2017 20:50
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Intent gets complicated in these questions because while the Great Dictator was not necessarily rubbing his hands in glee at all the death, they probably weren't too broken up about it either. EDIT: I think "failure of policy" is too weak. Ultimately those disasters demonstrated a fundamental callousness with regard to human life. Like if notionally Stalin was offered a deal with the devil to raise industrialisation by 1%, he might not be willing to pay *every* Ukrainian life to obtain it, but he wouldn't be only willing to pay 0 either. And Ukrainian lives were definitely considered less valuable. Fangz fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Nov 18, 2017 |
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Nov 18, 2017 20:53
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Looking up the hull number of a destroyer I saw in port led me to see what the newest destroyer was which led to my eye being caught by the USS Chung-Hoon, named for RADM Gordon Paiʻea Chung-Hoon, who was served in WW2, was a silver star recipient, and was the first Asian American flag officer. Can’t believe I never heard of him before. After a kamikaze crashed into the ship he was commanding: “ The damage had been severe enough that Admiral William Halsey, Jr. told Chung-Hoon to scuttle the ship. However, Chung-Hoon declined to do so, telling the admiral "No, I have kids on here that can't swim and I'm not putting them in the water. I'll take her back." “
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Nov 18, 2017 21:06
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FastestGunAlive posted:Looking up the hull number of a destroyer I saw in port led me to see what the newest destroyer was which led to my eye being caught by the USS Chung-Hoon, named for RADM Gordon Paiʻea Chung-Hoon, who was served in WW2, was a silver star recipient, and was the first Asian American flag officer. Can’t believe I never heard of him before. He was also a big football star back in college, if I remember.
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Nov 18, 2017 21:26
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Fangz posted:Ah, the author of the similarly snappily titled
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Nov 18, 2017 21:29
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occamsnailfile posted:It makes me wonder about questions of culpability in cases like the Irish Potato Famine and the Bengali famine though--people outright lied to Mao and Stalin out of fear for their lives. The British regime was told what was happening and proceeded ahead nonetheless. In actuality the impression of those events is similar to the impression of events people have for e.g. the famine in Ukraine in the latest scholarship, and they inform eachother. Modern Potato famine historians don't characterise the famine as genocidal either.
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Nov 18, 2017 21:33
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Rockopolis posted:Sounds like the next Chuck Tingle story. Trotskyite Analgasms: How Being Erased From the Party Turned Me Into a Gay Ice Pick
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Nov 18, 2017 22:25
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Phi230 posted:I bet if we went back in time you wouldn't say that about, say, protestants.
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Nov 18, 2017 22:28
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OwlFancier posted:This is actually really funny in context. 
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Nov 18, 2017 22:31
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Kanine posted:Blood Lies: The Evidence that Every Accusation against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands Is False by Grover Furr Hahahahahahahahaha
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Nov 19, 2017 00:18
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He's right.
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Nov 19, 2017 00:25
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Plutonis posted:He's right. Nope.
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Nov 19, 2017 00:33
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Don't talk too much poo poo about Grover Furr or Tankie Mod will have to hold a show trial.
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Nov 19, 2017 00:34
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The way to combat bad posting is with good posting, I'd like to resurrect this from a few days agoLibluini posted:A Korvettenkapitän called Albert Hopman told Tirpitz 1905 that his plan could not possible work and basically predicted exactly what happened in WWI. In 1912, Admiralstabschef August von Heeringen simulated what would happen if Hochseeflotte and the British Fleet fought each other in a potential war ("Kriegsspiel"). The leader playing the Royal Navy was ordered to play like a wimp, and the leader of the German side was ordered to play like a speed runner, trying to force a decisive battle as soon as possible. Counterpoint: There is no way of knowing how things would have gone if the German surface strategy of trying to draw out and destroy a portion of the Grand Fleet's battleship strength had ever worked, which only didn't happen after the Scarborough/Whitby/Hartlepool raid in 1914 thanks to some staggeringly bad luck for the HSF. That's a lot of metal that was about five minutes away from disappearing into the Devil's Hole.
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Nov 19, 2017 00:50
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Plutonis posted:He's right. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STotKiU9vH8
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Nov 19, 2017 01:01
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MANime in the sheets posted:How is iron ore 'bad'? I genuinely don't know, I'd think iron is iron is iron - after all it is a basic element. Is it just low concentrations in the rock, or...? Iron ore *isn't* iron, though, which is what makes it an ore. The iron in iron ore is all bound up in various iron oxides, generally mostly magnetite and hematite. So first, you have various grades of ore: if a quantity of rock is 60% hematite that's a "better" ore than one that's 10% hematite. To turn it into iron, you have to convince the oxygen atoms that are chemically bound with the iron to leave the iron alone and go bond with something else instead. Oxygen likes carbon more than it likes iron, so that's what bloomeries were for: you mix broken-up ore with charcoal and burn the charcoal in an oxygen-poor environment. Oxygen-poor, because if there's too much oxygen the carbon will just form CO2 and not do anything to the iron. Oxygen-poor, the carbon combusts to form carbon monoxide, everything heats up, the carbon monoxide starts reducing the iron oxides into pure iron. The resulting iron and the slag (melted impurities, stuff other than iron), all gloms together in the bottom of the vessel you're doing this in and is called a bloom. Since it's all mixed together, you can't really do anything with it yet. You have to heat it back up and pound the poo poo out of it with a big hammer to melt and knock all the slag out and what you're left with is called wrought iron. Wrought iron has a low carbon content and is malleable and forgeable, you can get it hot and beat it into the shape you want. If you let your bloomery get too hot, then the iron you're producing will melt, and will absorb a bunch of carbon. When it cools down, that's called pig iron, and all that carbon makes it brittle. You can cast things with it but if you bang on it it will shatter. The iron ore might also have other materials in it that will do bad things to final product. Phosphorous is bad, it makes steel very brittle. If you have an iron ore that's high in phosporous, that's a "bad" ore.The iron sands that Japanese swordsmiths had to work with was relatively high in phosphorous and other unwanted impurities, and the way they went about making swords was to deal with those impurities. A bloomery is basically a batch process: you mix up your iron ore and charcoal, cook it for a while, open up the bloomery and remove the bloom and then start beating the hell out of the bloom. A blast furnace is continuous: you mix up your iron ore and charcoal in a vessel that lets you blow air up through it, the iron ore gets reduced to molten iron, the molten iron sinks to the bottom of the furnace with the lighter slag floating on top, and you open the tap at the bottom and pour the iron out. Since this is molten iron, it's absorbed a lot of carbon and is pig iron, so if you want to do anything more than cast it you need to get some of the carbon back out of it. The metallurgy of steel is fantastically complicated. Steel is fundamentally an alloy of iron and carbon, but there are a bunch of different structures that that alloy can form, depending on how much carbon there is, the temperature you heated it to, how fast you cooled it, the presence of other trace elements, etc. You can have two batches of steel that are identical in all respects, *except* how fast you cooled them down, and they will have entirely different material properties.  So this is all ridiculously simplified. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Nov 20, 2017 |
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Nov 19, 2017 01:18
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 Amerika Bombers 1944: Ragnarocky Road Finished a new Amerika bomber post. I'm proud of this one because I think my heading titles are good. 
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Nov 19, 2017 03:23
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I found this documentary on traditional iron working really interesting. It shows every step in the process from gathering ore and flux to building a furnace to hammering out finished tools. I believe the process is similar in some ways to the techniques used by vikings and other iron age Europeans. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuCnZClWwpQ (bonus twerking at the end)
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Nov 19, 2017 03:29
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Squalid posted:(bonus twerking at the end) Those are the iron hoes.
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Nov 19, 2017 03:38
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occamsnailfile posted:Does this thread have a cosensus on Stalin re: the Holomodor or is now a bad time to ask about that? I've heard conflicting accounts every which way, but since we've had discussion of the Bengali famine lately it seems like fair's fair. I think the current consensus is about 3~5 million deaths, based upon other data (usually tax data) from the old soviet and ukrainian archives. Don't trust any estimates on death totals from before the 1990s. While the the current estimates still have considerable assumptions and uncertainty, they still make the cold war era estimates look like Herodotus* in comparison. *Tries hard and founded the study, but still nicknames "the father of lies".
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Nov 19, 2017 03:43
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Libluini posted:A Korvettenkapitän called Albert Hopman told Tirpitz 1905 that his plan could not possible work and basically predicted exactly what happened in WWI. In 1912, Admiralstabschef August von Heeringen simulated what would happen if Hochseeflotte and the British Fleet fought each other in a potential war ("Kriegsspiel"). The leader playing the Royal Navy was ordered to play like a wimp, and the leader of the German side was ordered to play like a speed runner, trying to force a decisive battle as soon as possible. (Thanks for the repost Trin...) This is a fascinating paragraph- how were simulations carried out at this time? I'm picturing something like an enormous and hideously complicated tabletop wargame, and I hope with all my heart this was the case.
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Nov 19, 2017 05:10
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Nebakenezzer posted:
A good read, as always. Minor typos: "KG 40 was withdrawn after the 'opening' night, loosing 6 of their 15 He 177s." s/b losing "The only way to prevail now is via the strategy of radial new technologies that would nullify the material advantage. This justified any number of late war wunder-waffen the Nazis are still famous for.", probably should be "radical' (unless the Nazis were using a tech web, like in Civilization: Beyond Earth). What was exiting in an Amerika bomber context is that the efficiency benefits of flying wings scaled up." s/b 'exciting' "GrossAdemiral Donitz and his staff met with Luftwaffe General Barsewisch and Major Fisher" s/b Grossadmiral
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Nov 19, 2017 06:23
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FAUXTON posted:
I got called up EDIT: Actually that's not really military history again so, anyone got anything interesting about the ancient persians? 
spectralent fucked around with this message at 10:33 on Nov 19, 2017 |
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Nov 19, 2017 10:30
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Trin Tragula posted:Counterpoint: There is no way of knowing how things would have gone if the German surface strategy of trying to draw out and destroy a portion of the Grand Fleet's battleship strength had ever worked, which only didn't happen after the Scarborough/Whitby/Hartlepool raid in 1914 thanks to some staggeringly bad luck for the HSF. That's a lot of metal that was about five minutes away from disappearing into the Devil's Hole. A lot of the "bad luck" of the Hochseeflotte stems from the German admiralty being to small, inexperienced and convoluted (there essentially were two different parts you could identify as an "admiralty" equivalent to the British one, and both worked against each other) -this lead to many, many bad decisions down the line. The raids in question and the lost opportunity are a symptom of this: Admiral Ingenohl already ignored standing orders of the Kaiser just to move his fleet out, without the German fleet's lack of experience in fleet combat and the hosed-up system he was forced to work under, he maybe had not reacted quite as cautiously and stayed at see. That's one point that should be repeated: All the major fleet actions in WWI happened essentially against the Kaisers explicit wishes. If his admirals hadn't tried to work around him, the German fleet would have probably sat around doing nothing for the entire war, instead of just most of it. As I see it, the German fleet could have had a chance at victory under two conditions: 1. Either concentrating on the submarine weapon from the earliest moment it was clear to the German admiralty conventional fleet actions would end in disaster or 2. Concentrating the decision-making capability of the admiralty at one point, which should not be the Kaiser. Also the admiralty should have been expanded to actually be able to do its loving work If the British had known how improvised their enemy's entire upper command structure was, they would have felt loving embarrassed for having so much trouble with the Hochseeflotte. Tree Bucket posted:(Thanks for the repost Trin...) I actually have a book which includes various descriptions of the German "Kriegsspiel", but I put it into storage somewhere in my tiny apartment, if I can I'll try to find it. Meanwhile, from the book I was quoting it seems clear from the usage of the term "Kriegsspiel", context and the clear separation from actual military maneuvers in the book's terminology that that's exactly what it was: An enormous tabletop wargame. According to Wikipedia: quote:1876 ist auf Anregung des damaligen Marineministers Albrecht von Stosch ein Seekriegsspiel eingeführt worden. Das Kriegsspiel wurde aus dem Kriegsschachspiel des 18. Jahrhunderts durch den preußischen Hofkriegsrat Georg Leopold von Reiswitz 1824 umgewandelt. Um seine Entwicklung hatten sich von Verdy und Meckel besonders verdient gemacht. Anleitungen zum Kriegsspiel gaben von Reiswitz (Berlin 1824), von Tschischwitz (4. Ausl., Neiße 1874), Meckel (Berlin 1875), von Trotha (3. Auflage, das. 1875), Verdy du Vernois (2. Aufl., das. 1881), von Braun („Das Kriegsspiel der Kavallerie“, Frankfurt an der Oder 1880).[2] It seems there indeed was a seewarfare-variant of the old Kriegsspiel made by von Reiswitz. The First Lord of the Admiralty in 1876, an Albrecht von Stosch, introduced it into the German Fleet. Albrecht von Stosch by the way, in typical German navy fashion, was an ex-infantry general. I have no idea why someone thought putting an old infantry man in charge of the new German fleet would be a good idea, but there you go. Anyway, if I can find this weird nerd-book about tabletop gaming again I'll look up the chapters about the Prussian Kriegsspiel and hopefully find the variant used in the German fleet in the run-up to WWI.
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