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Alex did well, but honestly the historical figure who really did the most coming from the least has to be Temujin. Went from living in a shack next to the woods and hunting squirrels to founding the largest land empire ever and kicking the poo poo out of at least two world powers.
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Jan 5, 2018 03:58
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How would a commander command infantry in such close quarters as on a boat? I thought in such close quarters there wasn't much you could do beyond go get 'em or telling them to stop and retreat.Comrade Gorbash posted:Alex did well, but honestly the historical figure who really did the most coming from the least has to be Temujin. Went from living in a shack next to the woods and hunting squirrels to founding the largest land empire ever and kicking the poo poo out of at least two world powers. Living in a shack doesn't really sound right for how a mongol would live, but it sure as hell wasn't growing up with your dad hiring one of the top scholars of your era to teach you, that's for sure.
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Jan 5, 2018 05:08
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Alex did well, but honestly the historical figure who really did the most coming from the least has to be Temujin. Went from living in a shack next to the woods and hunting squirrels to founding the largest land empire ever and kicking the poo poo out of at least two world powers. I would agree with this. His family was exiled by their clan and left to die after his father was murdered, they were supposedly close to starving when he was a kid. It was bleak. He goes from that to arguably the single most powerful man on Earth.
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Jan 5, 2018 05:41
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HEY GUNS posted:As far as I can tell, they were the same guild-like dudes, I have come across no mention of people not liking naval service.* They were also relatively rare as long as a small number of bronze cannon was the norm. Once you move to iron cannon (more numerous) you get more cannon but (in the opinion of the guy who wrote Gunpowder and Galleys) probably less good shooting. Ah, yeah, that makes sense - if they're still thinking of sea battles as wetter land battles there wouldn't have been much of a conceptual shift. Also I overestimated how heavily gunned ships in the early 17th century were - though they upgunned pretty quickly by the latter half of the century. SlothfulCobra posted:How would a commander command infantry in such close quarters as on a boat? I thought in such close quarters there wasn't much you could do beyond go get 'em or telling them to stop and retreat. Well, on Spanish ships, how it worked is that you have the shipmaster (not sure about the exact titles), who commands the sailors and makes the boat go, and then you have the commander of the infantry, who is in overall command and decides where the boat should go and how it should fight. Also the commander of the infantry usually has a higher social status than the lowly shipmaster. This leads to things like "You coward, why are you turning away from the enemy?!" "But they're directly upwind and we can't sail..." "I GAVE YOU AN ORDER!"
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Jan 5, 2018 05:56
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Epicurius posted:I'm 42. When Grant took command of the US army during the Civil War, he was 42. When George Washington took command of the Continental Army, he was 43. Man when I'm being envious Grant is definitely not a person who comes to mind. Dude's life is mostly a continuous strings of horrible gently caress-ups, interrupted only by the Civil War and (debatably) his Presidency. Forced to resign his commission because of alcoholism, reduced to selling firewood and begging money from his in laws, and then losing colossal amounts of money on sundry frauds and failed business schemes.
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Jan 5, 2018 06:11
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HEY GUNS posted:* remember that for a while, and I think especially for the Spanish, naval combat is conceptualized as "infantry combat, on a boat." So you get things like how the spanish have a system where the commander of the soldiers on the boat is supposed to command in combat, which must have been really fun times Galaxy brain: cavalry combat, on a boat.
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Jan 5, 2018 07:04
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The Lone Badger posted:Galaxy brain: cavalry combat, on a boat. Mongol Navy?
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Jan 5, 2018 07:05
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FAUXTON posted:Mongol Navy? I'm picturing something like an early modern version of an aircraft carrier. Massive flat decks to maneuver on. Rope-and-pulley lifts for bringing horses up from the stable deck.
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Jan 5, 2018 07:11
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Cythereal posted:To be fair, for long periods of time this was basically true. Boats are generally made to be hard to sink, all the more so when they're made of naturally buoyant wood. Until the invention of explosive shells, ship-to-ship weapons tended to be rather poor at making other ships sink. Ramming and boarding was the order of the day for a long, long time in history, and even in the Age of Sail it took a while for everyone to get the message that the day of naval actions being mainly driven by infantry had passed. I'm super interested in Age of Sail combat after reading through the Aubrey/Martin series, are there any good books for looking at the history of naval combat through that era?
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Jan 5, 2018 07:19
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The Lone Badger posted:I'm picturing something like an early modern version of an aircraft carrier. Massive flat decks to maneuver on. Rope-and-pulley lifts for bringing horses up from the stable deck. Neigh-val power where the ships of the line just form a jousting/buzkashi/combat polo field?
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Jan 5, 2018 07:25
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FAUXTON posted:Neigh-val power where the ships of the line just form a jousting/buzkashi/combat polo field? The capture of the Dutch fleet at Den Helder is what you’re looking for Cavalry charge across the Zuiderzee when it was frozen in winter netted 18 ships. There’s a painting of the event in that Wikipedia link and it’s loving magical.
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Jan 5, 2018 07:30
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apseudonym posted:I'm super interested in Age of Sail combat after reading through the Aubrey/Martin series, are there any good books for looking at the history of naval combat through that era? Oh yes. I like The Line Upon A Wind as a nice, fat history of 1793-1815. It has good detail on ship handling and shipboard life, politics and strategy, and the actual campaigns and battles. It's a fat book, but a comprehensive account has to be. it's a fantastic overview, with enough detail and color to make it all seem real. I'm also fond of Teddy Roosevelt's history - yes, that Teddy R. - The Naval War of 1812. It's mostly duels and a few larger fights such as the Great Lakes battles (which are cool as hell), so it fits with Aubrey/Martin. He writes a good narrative of the war, and does a lot of very interesting numerical analysis of the battles. He maybe spends too much time specifically debunking the official British history of the war, but he takes such obvious joy in it that it's hard not to be entertained.
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Jan 5, 2018 07:45
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Cyrano4747 posted:The capture of the Dutch fleet at Den Helder is what you’re looking for drat that is something special. Also lol at 3 citations on this statement: quote:A capture of ships by horsemen is an extremely rare feat in military history. [3][4][5]
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Jan 5, 2018 08:33
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Cythereal posted:To be fair, for long periods of time this was basically true. Boats are generally made to be hard to sink, all the more so when they're made of naturally buoyant wood. Until the invention of explosive shells, ship-to-ship weapons tended to be rather poor at making other ships sink. Ramming and boarding was the order of the day for a long, long time in history, and even in the Age of Sail it took a while for everyone to get the message that the day of naval actions being mainly driven by infantry had passed. That sounds right to me. IIRC, one of the major factors in the defeat of the Invincible Armada (apart from the whole storm thing) was that the Spanish ships were mostly armed with light man-killing cannon intended to prepare for boarding actions, while the English ships mostly carried heavy shipkillers.
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Jan 5, 2018 08:38
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FAUXTON posted:Mongol Navy? Sadly, their lack of genetics knowledge prevented them from becoming seahorse archers.
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Jan 5, 2018 08:52
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apseudonym posted:I'm super interested in Age of Sail combat after reading through the Aubrey/Martin series, are there any good books for looking at the history of naval combat through that era? I'm currently reading through "The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649-1815," and it's pretty interesting so far. Mind you, it focuses more on the political, financial and administrative impact of the navy than day-to-day life as a sailor or a captain, but it does provide a useful and interesting context for all those interesting battles as well as some of the pressures that drove various decisions. P.S. HEY GAL I'm up to the War of the Spanish Succession and everything up until then has basically been a neverending story of "We can't find the men to man the ships and we can't pay them or feed them when we find them anyways" which probably sounds super familiar to you. Also a short story to illustrate that early modern sailors could sometimes be just as wild as their land-based counterparts: quote:"George Bradford, chaplain of the "Sweepstakes," described by his captain as 'a gentleman recommended me by several worthy gentlemen' and 'very well approved of by the Bishop of London, went drinking ashore at every port: at Portsmouth he cheated the corporal of Marines at cards, at Dublin he danced naked around Trinity College, at Carrickfergus he and his wife pranced naked around the town 'catterwoolding' at one in the morning.'" Edit: Gnoman posted:That sounds right to me. From what I understand the Spanish Armada was less defeated than discouraged - the English weren't really doing much damage from the distance they were firing at, but the Spanish couldn't really chase them down to crush them either. Since the whole point of the Armada was to transport and provide cover for an invasion force (which hadn't shown up to be transported anyways), and since the ships were wearing out and supplies were running low, the admiral in command decided that with the Royal Navy still an active threat to the invasion it was better to give the whole thing up as a bad job. If I recall correctly most of the actual English damage to the Armada came after a fireship attack broke up the Spanish formation and allowed the English to dash in to close range with local superiority - not really a matter of "better, heavier English guns" as it was maneuverable ships dictating the pace of the engagement and an English determination not to get close unless they could be sure of superiority. Even this damage was relatively light compared to the size of the Armada, though. Tomn fucked around with this message at 09:22 on Jan 5, 2018 |
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Jan 5, 2018 09:10
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Jack2142 posted:I think one that gets me is Alexander the Great, just with what he accomplished at such a young age. Then for generations even other incredibly famous historical figures like Caeser visiting his tomb and lamenting how little they accomplished in comparison. bewbies posted:the entire beatles song catalogue was written by the time paul mccartney was 27 I wasn't lamenting that Winters accomplished more or got more poo poo done than I did at his age, rather that it's terrifying to put 26 year old me in his shoes - Having that crushing responsibility to such a large group of what are basically kids, and having a large number of them die or get maimed carrying out his orders. It's sort of hard to put into words, but since I started developing an interest in military history in my teens, the people I read about who fought these wars always seemed... adults, I guess? As a teen or young adult, you read about these people, and although you can sort of grasp the hardship they go through, you also can't really relate to them because they're older, more developed people than you are. You know you wouldn't be able to deal with that poo poo, but you also know that you're just a dumb loving kid. Then adulthood creeps up on you, not as any one defined point, but rather as a series of tiny, incremental changes that culminate in you waking up one morning with a mortgage to pay and children to feed, while still feeling like a teenager, and you realize that there's no such thing as an adult. And then it snaps into focus that these poor fuckers you read about weren't any smarter or grown up or tough or really any different than you, and you finally empathize with the awful reality of what they went through. At that point, for me, it got a little bit harder to "enjoy" military history in the typically juvenile way I always did, fawning over tanks and planes and poo poo, because those things are fundamentally ugly, awful things built to maim and kill other people like you. Typical discussions about things like gun A being able to penetrate the armor of tank X and N numbers of meters kind of snap into context, because the discussion is fundamentally about whether gun A is able to punch through a steel box to maim and kill a bunch of people like you in a completely gruesome and awful way. Sorry if this seems sappy or incoherent. 
Geisladisk fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Jan 5, 2018 |
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Jan 5, 2018 10:44
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The Lone Badger posted:Galaxy brain: cavalry combat, on a boat. Wasn't this the plot of the 300 sequel
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Jan 5, 2018 11:23
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Cythereal posted:To be fair, for long periods of time this was basically true. Boats are generally made to be hard to sink, all the more so when they're made of naturally buoyant wood. Until the invention of explosive shells, ship-to-ship weapons tended to be rather poor at making other ships sink. Ramming and boarding was the order of the day for a long, long time in history, and even in the Age of Sail it took a while for everyone to get the message that the day of naval actions being mainly driven by infantry had passed. The big difference between merchant ships and warships in the age of sail had more to do with maneuverability and a crew willing to fight than armament- many merchants were armed, some well armed. What tended to be the end of naval combat were either fires or crews/captains giving up. In the age of sail, boarding combat was not all that common.
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Jan 5, 2018 11:43
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Panzeh posted:The big difference between merchant ships and warships in the age of sail had more to do with maneuverability and a crew willing to fight than armament- many merchants were armed, some well armed. What tended to be the end of naval combat were either fires or crews/captains giving up. In the age of sail, boarding combat was not all that common. Indeed, but not everyone in the formal navies got the message early. Leading to crews/captains giving up in the Age of Sail was cannon fire thoroughly wrecking ships even if they didn't actually sink the target. With Age of Sail ships, iron shot causes splinters to fragment from wooden hulls, particularly on the interior of the ship, with... unfortunate consequences for the crew. Think spalling from tank warfare, only every ship is made of Nazi-quality steel (i.e. poo poo) and the internal fragments ricocheting around the interior are six foot long javelins that will maim, dismember, or kill anyone they touch.
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Jan 5, 2018 14:45
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SlothfulCobra posted:How would a commander command infantry in such close quarters as on a boat?
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Jan 5, 2018 14:48
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Tomn posted:I'm currently reading through "The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain 1649-1815," and it's pretty interesting so far. Mind you, it focuses more on the political, financial and administrative impact of the navy than day-to-day life as a sailor or a captain, but it does provide a useful and interesting context for all those interesting battles as well as some of the pressures that drove various decisions. quote:P.S. HEY GAL I'm up to the War of the Spanish Succession and everything up until then has basically been a neverending story of "We can't find the men to man the ships and we can't pay them or feed them when we find them anyways" which probably sounds super familiar to you. quote:From what I understand the Spanish Armada was less defeated than discouraged - the English weren't really doing much damage from the distance they were firing at, but the Spanish couldn't really chase them down to crush them either. Since the whole point of the Armada was to transport and provide cover for an invasion force (which hadn't shown up to be transported anyways), and since the ships were wearing out and supplies were running low, the admiral in command decided that with the Royal Navy still an active threat to the invasion it was better to give the whole thing up as a bad job. quote:If I recall correctly most of the actual English damage to the Armada came after a fireship attack broke up the Spanish formation and allowed the English to dash in to close range with local superiority - not really a matter of "better, heavier English guns" as it was maneuverable ships dictating the pace of the engagement and an English determination not to get close unless they could be sure of superiority. Even this damage was relatively light compared to the size of the Armada, though.
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Jan 5, 2018 14:52
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Interesting stuff on infantry and ship commanders. I’m drawing parallels to modern amphibious operations: Navy is in charge until it’s time to begin the landing and then the Marines are in charge (not that they are directly ordering ships where to go and what to do like these historical examples you all are sharing).
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Jan 5, 2018 15:05
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Cythereal posted:Indeed, but not everyone in the formal navies got the message early. Is this actually true i.e. do we have primary sources like medical logs and firsthand accounts to support it?
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Jan 5, 2018 15:08
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P-Mack posted:Is this actually true i.e. do we have primary sources like medical logs and firsthand accounts to support it? Splinter wounds are extremely well documented and real. Here's an experiment: https://ageofsail.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/more-on-splinters/ The Lawrence was a relatively lightly built brig but it's only getting popped by a long 12 or 18 and what looks like a 24lb carronade.
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Jan 5, 2018 15:14
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MrMojok posted:I would agree with this. His family was exiled by their clan and left to die after his father was murdered, they were supposedly close to starving when he was a kid. It was bleak. He goes from that to arguably the single most powerful man on Earth. Absolutely. He had a nominal claim to nobility from Yesugei but had almost no resources when he started unlike Alex who pretty much inherited an united Greece and Philip's veteran army.
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Jan 5, 2018 15:18
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Re: The Spanish Armada My understanding was that the real damage to the Armada came from the Spanish ships trying to get back home and having to go around the British Isles to do so as a combination of extremely bad weather and the British Navy harrying them every now and then. In regards to knocking out the Spanish Empire, I believe there is at least some credence to that idea as the cost do make the Armada was massive, and with it gone the New World was now a lot more open to the other European powers. Also with the Spanish empire being kept afloat by the sheer amount of gold they were being able to extract from the Americas meant that with their shipping lanes being more vulnerable then ever, the Spanish Empire was going to suffer for at least the short term.
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Jan 5, 2018 15:33
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Hunt11 posted:Re: The Spanish Armada
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Jan 5, 2018 15:36
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MrMojok posted:I would agree with this. His family was exiled by their clan and left to die after his father was murdered, they were supposedly close to starving when he was a kid. It was bleak. He goes from that to arguably the single most powerful man on Earth. Temujin's life is so dramatic that it could almost be mistaken for something invented for a historical drama: * His father was poisoned by their enemies, and Temujin's entire family was rejected when he tried to claim the position of chief and forced to live off whatever they could forage or hunt for several years. One of his half-brothers was a total prick and tried to claim Temujin's mother as a wife, which led to Temujin and another brother murdering him. * He got captured and enslaved by his father's former allies, but escaped with the help of a sympathetic guard, whose son would later become one of his generals. * His wife gets kidnapped, but he raids the camp she was given away to and rescues her. His friend who helped him rescue his wife, Jamukha, would later become a bitter rival for control over the Mongols. Almost 30 years later, Temujin would ultimately triumph and give Jamukha a bloodless execution to retain his honor, burying him with the golden belt he had given Jamukha many years ago to form a bond of brotherhood. By doing so, he became Genghis Khan, leader of all the consolidated Mongol tribes.
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Jan 5, 2018 15:55
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I'm getting the impression that had the Spanish Empire not poured all their treasure into fighting an ultimately lost war with the Dutch, they wouldn't have had nearly as many economic problems as they did. That said, if you let some rebels humiliate your empire too many times you might find all your subjects rebelling, so it may have simply swapped one set of problems for another.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:01
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Splinter wounds are extremely well documented and real. Here's an experiment: Thanks! Any examples of the primary documentation? Link says it exists but no details. Like a period account talking about "hourible Splintyres did grieivousley Wound and maim sevveral Men and the ship's Dogge. All Dead were buryed at Sea, excepting one Man's peculiar Organnes which have been pickled for benefit of the Royal Society "
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Jan 5, 2018 16:02
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Silver more than gold. They found an almost literal mountain of silver in Peru, and mining it out ultimately destabilized the economies of the two most powerful empires in the world at the time (their own, and Ming China). ¿Que es la inflación? 
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Jan 5, 2018 16:07
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P-Mack posted:Like a period account talking about "hourible Splintyres did grieivousley Wound and maim sevveral Men and the ship's Dogge. All Dead were buryed at Sea, excepting one Man's peculiar Organnes which have been pickled for benefit of the Royal Society " It is unlikely there is a quote from any primary source that is better or more accurate than this.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:09
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HEY GUNS posted:* remember that for a while, and I think especially for the Spanish, naval combat is conceptualized as "infantry combat, on a boat." Sounds like the Roman approach. And as a former Marine, OF COURSE IT WAS.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:18
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P-Mack posted:Thanks! Any examples of the primary documentation? Link says it exists but no details. go wild my friend: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/surgeonsatsea/ even the English who were putatively Good At Boats were still trying to draw a distinction between "guys who drive the boat" and "guys who do the fighting" in the early 1500s.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:23
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Cythereal posted:Indeed, but not everyone in the formal navies got the message early. Don't forget there is usually only a single qualified surgeon who may or may not know more about cutting hair/pulling teeth or bleeding horses than trying to save your doomed body. So currently been plugging away Pakenham's Boer War and got to say if we ever do an Imperial Idiot award thing the commanding officer of the first skirmish against that Boer Battery should certainly be a winner of the Golden Bludger for sure.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:26
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Geisladisk posted:It's sort of hard to put into words, but since I started developing an interest in military history in my teens, the people I read about who fought these wars always seemed... adults, I guess? As a teen or young adult, you read about these people, and although you can sort of grasp the hardship they go through, you also can't really relate to them because they're older, more developed people than you are. You know you wouldn't be able to deal with that poo poo, but you also know that you're just a dumb loving kid. Then adulthood creeps up on you, not as any one defined point, but rather as a series of tiny, incremental changes that culminate in you waking up one morning with a mortgage to pay and children to feed, while still feeling like a teenager, and you realize that there's no such thing as an adult. And then it snaps into focus that these poor fuckers you read about weren't any smarter or grown up or tough or really any different than you, and you finally empathize with the awful reality of what they went through. I joined the Marines at 17, and had my 18th birthday on Parris Island. (No, I did not have a party.) I was a combat veteran at 19. No, it wasn't WWII, but it was still getting shot at. I don't think you become "more adult" or anything like that, you just make it through, deal with it, and keep going, just like everyone else is doing. And to this day, even all these years later, I feel like there's a disconnect between me and my contemporaries who didn't go through that. Not in a good way; I feel like my life was put on hold for those years and I missed out on the experiences that others build on to progress, like going to college as a kid (I went later) or the like.
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Jan 5, 2018 16:27
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Oh no not the Ship's Dogge! 
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Jan 5, 2018 16:28
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Siivola posted:Oh no not the Ship's Dogge! I get super sadder thinking about the ships cats lost with a lot of good men during both world wars too. Poor little things 
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Jan 5, 2018 16:30
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did the Germans have a blanket "no surrender" policy in place during WWII, and if so, can someone source it for me?
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Jan 5, 2018 16:46
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