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chitoryu12 posted:The first time you'd start seeing something like it would be the 19th century when canning became a thing, but it was still a sort of slapdash process until World War I when you started having regular rations in regular packing. Even then, rations were still often done in the form of "24 ounces of boneless meat per day" and what you got wasn't guaranteed; I read something about how Italian soldiers in WW2 would sometimes get nothing but 3 cans of tuna a day, and the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge turned to stolen American rations and whatever they could scrounge from abandoned civilian buildings as their food ran out (one soldier I read about grabbed some old apples off the ground and was struck with diarrhea for his trouble). You do see some early stuff around/before WW1, such as the US Iron Ration, but the C-Ration is really the big one.
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Feb 2, 2018 02:04
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Cyrano4747 posted:If you're walking and working with your body all day you burn a fuckton of calories. You just need that many to keep on your feet. Look up what some athletes eat and it's goddamned jaw dropping - upwards of five figures per day. That's an extreme example, but it illustrates the principle. doing anything with a pike takes a LOT out of you, too
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Feb 2, 2018 02:11
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Taerkar posted:US Iron Ration Is this as delicious as it sounds?
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Feb 2, 2018 02:18
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Taerkar posted:They had a secret ally in BuOrd though. Reposting a brief writeup I did about this from a different thread for context: In the years leading up to World War 2, the US Navy had designed the Mark 14 torpedo, which was supposed to be the hot new standard for naval munitions. The problem was that the design and testing happened in the middle of the Great Depression, so the Navy was extremely reluctant to do any testing that might damage or destroy the torpedoes, and the Navy DEFINITELY didn't want to do any testing that would, you know, actually damage ships. If you've seen the HBO movie "The Pentagon Wars," it was kind of like that. The hot new technology in these torpedoes was a magnetic detonator, with the idea that the torpedo would go underneath an enemy ship, and then detonate right underneath it, breaking the keel and causing way more damage than just punching a hole in the hull. It was a good idea in theory, but because it was so secret at the time, they did basically no testing of the detonator, and they didn't train crews on using it. Yeah. World War 2 rolls around and wouldn't you know it this poo poo does not work. At all. The torpedoes would either blow up way too early, go right underneath the target ship with a somewhat noticeable lack of exploding, bonk the side of the ship with a very noticeable lack of exploding, or in some cases fire in a big circle and come back around to hit the ship that fired it. poo poo like this would happen:  The Bureau of Ordinance's response to this? "You're shooting it wrong." They denied there was a problem and blamed the submarine crews for the problems. It would take years to be the Bureau of Ordinance to even admit there was a problem and to fix it, in 1943.
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Feb 2, 2018 02:29
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Ainsley McTree posted:Is this as delicious as it sounds? It's 3 each of a beef bouillon-and-wheat cake and a bar of chocolate, plus salt and pepper, packed into a sealed tin tube. Bare minimum for 3 meals to stay alive.
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Feb 2, 2018 02:55
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Grand Prize Winner posted:If night bombing remained dangerous even when the USAAF was doing day-bombing raids with impunity then why did the night bombing continue? Feel like I'm missing something here. Well, impunity is topping it a little high except for 1945. This wikipedia article is a very good overview. The actual answer is complected. As the war went on, night bombing went from being purely a morale exercise to doing serious damage to Third Reich economic infrastructure - and taking lots of casualties was never seen as an argument against day or night bombing? The guy in charge of the British-Commonwealth bombing campaign was a interesting dude named Air Marshall Harris, who thought he was literally going to win the war with bombing - and was not on the ULTRA list, so he didn't know how ineffective a lot of night bombing efforts actually were. In the Battle of Berlin (the night bomber's effort to literally destroy Berlin and prove the "break the enemy's morale aspect" of the strategic bombing thesis) the Allied Air Forces lost more heavy bombers than the Luftwaffe built in WW2, and that was just in later 1943 / early 1944.
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Feb 2, 2018 03:05
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Instant Sunrise posted:World War 2 rolls around and wouldn't you know it this poo poo does not work. At all. The torpedoes would either blow up way too early, This only happened later. At first, this is what happened: quote:go right underneath the target ship with a somewhat noticeable lack of exploding And that's because they never bothered to do real live-fire testing of the actual torpedo. Test shots used a concrete ballast that was lighter than the actual warhead (and later, that warhead was replaced with an even heavier one), so in actual use the torpedos would run too deep for the magnetic detonator to sense the target ship. Once that was figured out, skippers started setting a depth of 0, so the torpedoes would run on the surface, which would make them somewhat easier to spot and avoid but oh well. Then it turned out that the magnetic detonators would do the blow-up-way-too-early thing. So skippers started deactivating the magnetic detonators and just using the contact fuses. And that's what led to: quote:, bonk the side of the ship with a very noticeable lack of exploding Because the detonator assembly was so heavy that when you scored a perfect hit, perpendicular to the target, like you'd been trained to do, the detonator assembly would bend itself into knots instead of detonating. Note that these each one of these problems masked an additional, underlying problem. And BuOrd didn't want to hear about any of them. quote:, or in some cases fire in a big circle and come back around to hit the ship that fired it. This had several causes. In some cases, it could be a misassembled torpedo with a gyro in backwards, it could be a malfunction, or in other cases it happened because a torpedoman plain forget to install the gyro prior to launch.
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Feb 2, 2018 03:05
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Thanks for the clarifications.
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Feb 2, 2018 03:15
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Geisladisk posted:How were levy soldiers in feudal conflicts motivated to fight? For the past couple of hundred years, at least, wars have been rationalized and "sold" to the people fighting those wars with nationalism, ethnicity, religion, or idealism. Most people aren't terribly interested in killing other people, so it is pretty important to motivate them to do it. You kind of touched on it, but without the concept of nationalism, the people from "only" the next province over (this is a huge distance to a peasant who may have spent their entire life in a ~10 mile radius of where they were born) might as well be aliens - even with the same culture and language. Totally imperfect example, but it's the first thing that comes to mind to describe the animosity - sports rivalries. Obviously the circumstances are much different but think of English soccer hooligans brawling with each other. London has 12 teams so in many cases these guys are from the same drat city and they have no problem beating the hell out of each other over a game. Much lower stakes than "these guys are coming to take our land". Again, not a perfect example, but it's not necessarily difficult to motivate people to fight each other even when you share the same culture. As others have referenced, the bigger motivator was probably the potential for plunder. In Sengoku era Japan if you managed to kill an enemy samurai and presented his head to Lord Whatever, you'd be rewarded monetarily, regardless of status. Typically it was the guys who are already samurai collecting the loot, but common foot soldiers occasionally accomplished the feat and were rewarded or even made samurai. It was a big motivator for a lot of ashigaru. Famously, Hideyoshi started out as a common soldier and he ended up briefly unifying Japan.
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Feb 2, 2018 03:21
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Siivola posted:You volunteer in the hopes of getting paid. Involuntary conscription is a modern thing. Maybe among the petty barbarian tribes of the far west. Civilized people figured out they could keep their soldiers as virtual slaves over a thousand years ago Du Fu posted:The wagons rumble and roll, *Notes: This poem dates from around 750 (Watson p. 8) or 751 (Hawkes p. 10). The Xianyang bridge was southwest (Hawkes p. 12) or north (Watson p. 9) of Chang'an; in either case, the conscripts are being sent to fight on the western border. The soldiers guarding the river were guarding the Yellow River; those tilling fields in the west worked at garrisons with their own farms, to make them self-sufficient (Hawkes p. 13). The martial emperor was emperor Wu of the Han dynasty, here standing in for the current emperor, Xuanzong (Hawkes p. 14). Qin and west of the pass both refer to the Chang'an area (Watson p. 9); Qinghai is on the border with Tibet (Watson p. 9). http://www.chinese-poems.com/d16.html
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Feb 2, 2018 03:23
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Here's a good detailed writeup on the issues: https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/Admin-Hist/BuOrd/BuOrd-6.html It's really interesting how many things conspired to mask the problems. Torpedo production was limited, so in the limited test firings you'd do at practice targets, you deliberately set the torpedo to underrun so that you could avoid damaging the torpedo and could recover and reuse it. So if it ran deeper than you intended, you wouldn't even notice.
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Feb 2, 2018 03:27
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Jamwad Hilder posted:You kind of touched on it, but without the concept of nationalism, the people from "only" the next province over (this is a huge distance to a peasant who may have spent their entire life in a ~10 mile radius of where they were born) might as well be aliens - even with the same culture and language. we are more peaceful right now than we ever were, which is sobering. quote:As others have referenced, the bigger motivator was probably the potential for plunder. In Sengoku era Japan if you managed to kill an enemy samurai and presented his head to Lord Whatever, you'd be rewarded monetarily, regardless of status. Typically it was the guys who are already samurai collecting the loot, but common foot soldiers occasionally accomplished the feat and were rewarded or even made samurai. It was a big motivator for a lot of ashigaru. Famously, Hideyoshi started out as a common soldier and he ended up briefly unifying Japan. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Feb 2, 2018 |
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Feb 2, 2018 03:29
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Grand Prize Winner posted:If night bombing remained dangerous even when the USAAF was doing day-bombing raids with impunity then why did the night bombing continue? Feel like I'm missing something here. Early on the USAAF day-bombing strategy was very costly in men and material, and the RAF had switched to night bombing to begin with because their losses in 1939 daylight raids were so large. Allied air superiority couldn't really be accomplished until large numbers of long-range escort fighters could be fielded every day as well. I expect that there was a point in 1943-1944 where you'd much rather be a on RAF night bomber crew than an 8th Air Force heavy.
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Feb 2, 2018 04:32
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Jamwad Hilder posted:Obviously the circumstances are much different but think of English soccer hooligans brawling with each other. London has 12 teams so in many cases these guys are from the same drat city and they have no problem beating the hell out of each other over a game. Much lower stakes than "these guys are coming to take our land". Sorry dude, you're building on a swamp here. Setting aside for the moment that hooligan culture has been dead for at least 20 years, the most important thing to understand is that they aren't fighting over the football. They're fighting because they like fighting, and they like to do it in a more organised way than just getting pissed in the town centre and smacking someone (but a less organised way than the kind of fighting that involves sergeant-majors, delivering bollockings, for the use of). Football's just a convenient excuse; it gives you territory and colours to fight for, but you're not fighting for any reason other than you like to fight. Hooligan culture may be dead, but you can still find the people who would in the 80s have been in a firm; nowadays they get involved with the English Defence League or one of the other PFJ-like factions. Very few of them are politically aware beyond the level of "that Farage bloke talks a lot of sense", but they've got something to identify with and two ready-made enemies (antifa and the police). EDL marches are virtually identical to an 80s football away trip, except there's more people buzzing around in hi-vis jackets and no football.
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Feb 2, 2018 04:55
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a good friend of mine is a very large dutch guy who thought about becoming a football hooligan and became a reenactor instead he likes pikes and smoking weed
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Feb 2, 2018 05:04
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HEY GUNS posted:a good friend of mine is a very large dutch guy who thought about becoming a football hooligan and became a reenactor instead What do you mean "thought about becoming a football hooligan"? Like, he considered it as a profession or lifestyle?
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Feb 2, 2018 06:04
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How well would a reenacting crew do if they showed up to a football riot as a pike block?
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Feb 2, 2018 06:14
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The Lone Badger posted:How well would a reenacting crew do if they showed up to a football riot as a pike block? Depends which teams tbf probably stay away from Millwall
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Feb 2, 2018 06:18
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Saint Celestine posted:What do you mean "thought about becoming a football hooligan"? lifestyle, yeah. he gave it some thought and decided to pike instead
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Feb 2, 2018 06:27
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Trin Tragula posted:Sorry dude, you're building on a swamp here. Setting aside for the moment that hooligan culture has been dead for at least 20 years, the most important thing to understand is that they aren't fighting over the football. They're fighting because they like fighting, and they like to do it in a more organised way than just getting pissed in the town centre and smacking someone (but a less organised way than the kind of fighting that involves sergeant-majors, delivering bollockings, for the use of). Football's just a convenient excuse; it gives you territory and colours to fight for, but you're not fighting for any reason other than you like to fight. What no Hooligan culture is exceedingly alive and well, it's just moved out of the UK. Poland has organized tourneys for their hooligan firms with their own prize cups and poo poo, and in South America people get shot at over football on a monthly basis.
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Feb 2, 2018 09:33
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Squalid posted:Maybe among the petty barbarian tribes of the far west. Civilized people figured out they could keep their soldiers as virtual slaves over a thousand years ago Or y'know literal slaves, something something Janissaries.
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Feb 2, 2018 10:47
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Nenonen posted:Finally NSDAP was a revolutionary party and as such knew how to quell other revolutionaries. Not sure on this one tbh. I mean it explicitly did not stage an armed revolution to come to power and in any case mutiny was a Big Deal in both WW1 and WW2. Situations differ; revolutionary mutinies are not how wars usually end. The naval mutinies in Germany in WW1 have to be seen alongside the mutinies and proto-revolutionary situation everywhere else; nobody was forming soviets in Germany in 1945 (well, except maybe the Soviets) and that included the Navy. (That said, the more people you have sitting unhappy in one place, e.g. in a naval base with big ships where nobody's going to sea, the more likely you are to see collective action)
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Feb 2, 2018 10:55
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Grand Prize Winner posted:If night bombing remained dangerous even when the USAAF was doing day-bombing raids with impunity then why did the night bombing continue? Feel like I'm missing something here. There also came a point where it was a question of space, when both air forces exceeded the 1000 bomber mark the skies over Germany were becoming somewhat crowded so a decision was also made that the RAF work at night and the USAF during the day, see things like the attack on Dresden where the RAF hit them in the night followed up the next morning by the USAF as a very direct consequence.
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Feb 2, 2018 11:11
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Nebakenezzer posted:The guy in charge of the British-Commonwealth bombing campaign was a interesting dude named Air Marshall Harris, who thought he was literally going to win the war with bombing - and was not on the ULTRA list, so he didn't know how ineffective a lot of night bombing efforts actually were. In the Battle of Berlin (the night bomber's effort to literally destroy Berlin and prove the "break the enemy's morale aspect" of the strategic bombing thesis) the Allied Air Forces lost more heavy bombers than the Luftwaffe built in WW2, and that was just in later 1943 / early 1944. What? I'm sure Harris had access to Ultra - he just chose to disbelieve the intel. Finding out that more German civilians died from car accidents that British bombs for example, or that 90% of the bombers arn't getting within 50 miles of the target or that having 3 different signals coming from the bombers was lighting them up as a Christmas tree to German detectors. Granted I got this all from Most Secret War (which has it's own agenda) but considering the chief of British Science At War knew all about Ultra, I find it hard to believe Harris did not. Still made him just as much a butcher as Haig was, if not more.
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Feb 2, 2018 11:22
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Comstar posted:Harris was... just as much a butcher as Haig was, if not more. Eh? One of these was intentionally attacking civilian targets, the other was a WW1 general. They're not comparable.
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Feb 2, 2018 11:46
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Comstar posted:What? I'm sure Harris had access to Ultra - he just chose to disbelieve the intel. Finding out that more German civilians died from car accidents that British bombs for example, or that 90% of the bombers arn't getting within 50 miles of the target or that having 3 different signals coming from the bombers was lighting them up as a Christmas tree to German detectors. It's possible you know something I don't, but I've read that Harris did not have access to ULTRA. That said, Harris still might have had access to reports on the ineffectiveness of night bombing - after all, Bomber Command did switch from trying to hit specific targets to lighting cities on fire.
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Feb 2, 2018 12:20
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Gort posted:Eh? One of these was intentionally attacking civilian targets, the other was a WW1 general. They're not comparable. They were both very good at getting their own men killed for no appreciable impact until they had several years of practice and the enemy was losing for other reasons. Granted, a solider under Haig had a better chance of survival than an airman under Harris, so there's that.
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Feb 2, 2018 12:27
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I'm really confused about the argument being made here. Harris and everyone else knew the problem about imprecision of bombings. That's kinda the point of the switch to area bombing - you know you can't hit specific targets so you go for cities instead. You don't have to believe that you can win wars by bombing alone to justify city bombing, and Harris's viewpoint is much less naive than presented: his argument was not simply that bombing would make the Germans surrender, but that if it didn't, the disruption, the flow of refugees, the daily fear and terror, all of that would present a tangible benefit to the war effort. The argument that bombing killed fewer than car accidents is one that Harris would, if he were alive, present to his defense - that yes area bombing created civilian deaths, but they were disproportionate to the broader effect of the terror, and of making the Germans spend resources to defend against it. The argument about Ultra is, if anything else, actually the opposite - that Harris should have known that actually attacks against specific targets like transportation etc *are actually effective*, and thus refocused away from area targets back to point ones. Without Ultra Harris would have other intel suggesting his strategy was working - you would not need secret decrypts to know that the destruction of Hamburg made Germans feel unsafe. Both Haig and Harris were ultimately ruthless men working with a new and unprecedented type of war. That much is true.
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Feb 2, 2018 12:43
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Comstar posted:They were both very good at getting their own men killed for no appreciable impact until they had several years of practice and the enemy was losing for other reasons. Not to be overly dismissive of the people who died. But this judgement is incredibly hindsighty, organisational learning curves are very rough and when you are doing it in war people die. It would have been marvelous had bomber command had the experience, tools and capability to fight efficiently at the start of the war, but they didn't, same broadly for Haig, both constantly and consistently tried to innovate but came up against situational obstacles that were very hard to overcome.
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Feb 2, 2018 12:50
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Another point is that high casualty rates are generally down to the way individuals are repeatedly put into dangerous missions until they die. An individual footsoldier in WWII likely only goes through a handful of battles. A bomber crewman or submarine crewman will just be sent back on another mission. If bomber crews were regularly replaced by fresh crew, the proportions dying would be a lot lower. So if you are talking about high casualty rates, probably Japanese fighter pilots would be another example. Or possibly German tank crew. Hard to find the figures though. Fangz fucked around with this message at 13:09 on Feb 2, 2018 |
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Feb 2, 2018 12:58
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The proportions would be lower because of the overall number compared to the casualty rate, but that doesn't mean fewer people would die. Flak doesn't discriminate, you know.
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Feb 2, 2018 13:13
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Polyakov posted:Not to be overly dismissive of the people who died. But this judgement is incredibly hindsighty, organisational learning curves are very rough and when you are doing it in war people die. It would have been marvelous had bomber command had the experience, tools and capability to fight efficiently at the start of the war, but they didn't, same broadly for Haig, both constantly and consistently tried to innovate but came up against situational obstacles that were very hard to overcome. Bomber command was told for months that their bombing couldn't hit a city, and took a long time to come to that view. Then after they had evidence they *could* hit single targets they kept up targeting cities to "break the enemies morale" after winning a campaign where Fighter Command had just proved it won't work. Much like Haig, Harris had (lower level) people telling him he was doing it wrong and took a long time to come to the conclusion that there might be a better way. Haig at least had pretty bad intel (did he ever get rid of his bad intelligence officer?), but Harris has much less excuse.
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Feb 2, 2018 13:14
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Jobbo_Fett posted:The proportions would be lower because of the overall number compared to the casualty rate, but that doesn't mean fewer people would die. Flak doesn't discriminate, you know. Right, but we *are* looking at percentages here, I'm just saying that it's important to understand what the numbers mean. quote:Bomber command was told for months that their bombing couldn't hit a city, and took a long time to come to that view. Then after they had evidence they *could* hit single targets they kept up targeting cities to "break the enemies morale" after winning a campaign where Fighter Command had just proved it won't work. This is inaccurate. Bomber command definitely *can* hit a city, Hamburg was one of the first. Harris was operating from British research about the effects of the Blitz that argued that strategic bombing could have a large impact on industrial productivity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehousing And in the event, it might not have won the war immediately, but strategic bombing did have an impact. That's not to say it was ethical and/or a good use of resources, that's quite open to debate. Fangz fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Feb 2, 2018 |
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Feb 2, 2018 13:15
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Comstar posted:Bomber command was told for months that their bombing couldn't hit a city, and took a long time to come to that view. Then after they had evidence they *could* hit single targets they kept up targeting cities to "break the enemies morale" after winning a campaign where Fighter Command had just proved it won't work. What do you mean by "Bomber Command was told for monthsale that they couldn't hit a city, and took a long time to come to that view"? Bomber command got really good at hitting cities. See, for instance, Luebeck, Hamburg, Dresden...
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Feb 2, 2018 13:24
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Comstar posted:Bomber command was told for months that their bombing couldn't hit a city, and took a long time to come to that view. Then after they had evidence they *could* hit single targets they kept up targeting cities to "break the enemies morale" after winning a campaign where Fighter Command had just proved it won't work. This is very, very revisionist about both Haig and Harris. Haig was not particularly exceptional in terms of WWI generals either way - certainly he was focused on his career and had a tendency not to listen to generals from an infantry background over ones from his preferred cavalry background, but he wasn't an incompetent butcher in the manner of say, Cadorna. Haig was given a mission from political higher ups to attack entrenched positions on the Western Front, a task that was going to be very, very difficult no matter who was in charge. It wasn't like Falkenhayn did a whole lot better at Verdun for the Germans, and while the Somme involve enormous casualties for the British and Commonwealth troops, huge numbers of Germans also died; German high command after the Somme were extremely worried about the future of the Western Front. As for Harris you have to put the decisions made by Bomber Command in their proper historical context. In the interwar period Britain went, for a whole host of reasons, fully in on the concept of winning wars by strategic bombing. Thus the RAF (specifically the bombers) were the highest funded arm of the British armed forces in the leadup to WWII. There was a huge amount of institutional inertia behind making strategic bombing work whatever it took, which you can't just boil down to "It was Bomber Harris' idea". Certainly he was pushing for it, but there was a whole context behind it that meant when he pushed for night raids, dehousing etc. people would listen.
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Feb 2, 2018 13:56
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Epicurius posted:What do you mean by "Bomber Command was told for monthsale that they couldn't hit a city, and took a long time to come to that view"? Bomber command got really good at hitting cities. See, for instance, Luebeck, Hamburg, Dresden... Sure...by mid 1943 and it's half way through the war already. And Hamburg was a one off that didn't repeat for awhile. Which is also right around the time Bomber command starts to have the technology where they *can* hit more precise targets, but now they can hit cities, would rather use it on that. It's not just a matter of looking back and seeing they did it wrong- they were being told during the time that there were better ways of doing things and wilfully and with bloody-mindedness chose not to. At one point the high command was refusing to tell the crews to turn off their (3!) broadcast electronic transmitters which the German night fighters were homing in on because it helped keep the crews morale up. Ignoring the ULTRA traffic that is quite plainly telling them it's a bad ideas and the Luftwaffe was using it against them. Not to mention the same use the Fighter Command had been doing the exact same thing in the night time Blitz. This went on for a year or more and from what I recall wasn't ordered to be stopped till late 1944. Granted, Harris was a product of his time and the creation of such a man was probably inevitable with the way the RAF had been built up. Haig for the same reason for WW1 - the culture was going to end up like that, and for nearly all the armies of WW1, did. But then you get people like John Monash or Dowding of Fighter Command who DO learn lessons and spend the time to work things out that there is a better way. Comstar fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Feb 2, 2018 |
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Feb 2, 2018 13:57
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Considering he served in the Boer War Haig had to make his own set of nasty not so sunny choices that didn't benefit mankind. It seems also a very loose argument as with both men, their backgrounds, service and conflict as well as the atmosphere and world they grew up in changed a lot as well. Also calling Haig a Butcher smacks of a very narrow view too considering the bloody nature of the First World War western front a lot of generals and field commanders on both sides could get that stupid title from the groping unfamiliarity with mechanised conflict against a dug in force that knows well with old world views they just need to cling onto the ground they got to win. And Harris and the RAF were certainly not the only ones who followed that train of thought in that war either.
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Feb 2, 2018 14:12
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The whole haig/harris butcher meme really exists because of the post-war reactions of people to the battles they had just fought. As men who were in very prominent leadership positions in their respective fields during the war they became synonymous with its conduct and resolution after the war. In the case of Haig this means that a lot of people who are staring aghast at the human cost of victory in the twenties turn on him as a symbol of the grinding, seemingly pointless attacks that got all their sons and husbands killed. In the case of Harris it's post-war Britain getting full exposure to just how much devastation they rained down on German cities, an increasingly close cold war relationship to the Germans, and a growing discomfort with wholesale urban destruction as the nuclear age unfolds. They're both really good examples of how post-war memory can make people into cultural villains.
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Feb 2, 2018 14:21
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Didn't we just have the argument that Harris *didn't have access to ULTRA*? Harris only got the job in 1942. Hamburg was 1943, Cologne was 1942. The Butts 'can't hit a city' report was 1941. The government issued area bombing directive was 1942. Assembling the world's first significant heavy strategic bombing force in a few months isn't easy, buddy. And it's really facile to say that the Blitz proved strategic bombing can't work. There is one essential difference: Germany was in a land war in Russia. Every 88mm trying to shoot bombers over Germany is one that isn't blasting T34s on the East. Every fighter patrolling the skies isn't downing Sturmoviks over Kursk. Every worker cowering in an air raid shelter isn't assembling Stugs for the front. And yeah, Harris is kinda an easy scapegoat. He is not making decisions in isolation.
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Feb 2, 2018 14:21
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The strategic bombing campaign is one of those things that someone just starting to study WWII tends to latch onto as a good and easy thing to critique.
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Feb 2, 2018 15:14
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