|
Cyrano4747 posted:Another issue is one common to military memoirs and even just service member stories in general. Whether written or talking about the war with guys in a bar, recounting these kinds of things is a performative act. As such the people putting on the performance (i.e. the vets) will tune what they're saying to their audience. When your mother asks about the war you probably don't lead off with the time your best friend's brains got in your eyes or that other time you helped murder a village. By the same token the guys in the bar probably aren't interested in the maintenance headaches that your transmission posed or what kind of combined arms tactics you used with the local infantry. I would like to use this as an incredibly thin excuse to repost one of my favourite bits of humourous writing, in which the author goes on a sailing trip with some friends; during one convivial evening they all start talking about what they did in the war and he muses on the ritualised performance of it all. quote:Beaver's remarks about VE night in Cairo started a spate of reminiscence. We all knew each other's wartime stories, of course, and waited politely for each to finish before dashing in with our own. The formula on these occasions is to say, as the laughter for the previous story dies down, 'I don't know whether I told you about the time I was stationed in North Wales....' and everyone else, who has heard the story at least twenty times before, politely mutters, 'No, no,' and then the speaker launches into a tissue of lies based on some long-forgotten original incident. Hearing these stories every year, it was interesting to see how they grew under intense competition from everyone.
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 02:21
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 17:45 |
|
|
Comrade Gorbash posted:IIRC the main issue is that there wasn't sufficient ventilation. The ambient temperature is pretty quickly overwhelmed if you trap a volume of air around a heat source in a metal box. Is this one of those issues where it is just because the technology is new and not well understood? Or did they think circulation of air would freeze the engine in the Antarctic? It's just overheating in the Antarctic - it's like being in the Antarctic and being out of ice Other old tank tales: is it true the first tanks didn't have exhaust pipes and would slowly gas their own crew with CO? Ensign Expendable posted:Pfft, that's not how you do a winter tank. THIS is how you do a winter tank. Nice - the snow airboat. Did it work?
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 02:34
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:Is this one of those issues where it is just because the technology is new and not well understood? Or did they think circulation of air would freeze the engine in the Antarctic? It's just overheating in the Antarctic - it's like being in the Antarctic and being out of ice From my understanding, the sledge's engines were sealed up too well to protect them from the elements, and thus had barely enough ventilation even for the trial conditions. Once they got to Antarctica, several factors suddenly made that very important. One of the sledges was lost through the ice, putting a heavier work load on the remaining two. They also had more trouble with the conditions than expected, leading the engines being run for longer periods at at higher RPMs. They may also have been getting insufficient oil - either not enough was being added, or the conditions had changed the oil's properties and meant it wasn't efficiently getting worked into the engine - increasing friction and making the engines run even hotter. All of a sudden they're putting off way more heat, and that rapidly overwhelmed the advantage of a lower ambient temperature. The tricky thing to determine exactly is where the critical breakdown was. The design may have just been inherently flawed, or the conditions too harsh for the technology of the day, no matter how well put together. But the Scott expedition also didn't have a qualified mechanic with them, having left behind the sledge's designer as the insistence of Evans, the second in command, because the designer was technically of higher rank. Someone who properly understood the machines might have been able to diagnose and correct the problem - and that's even before considering that improper care (like not putting enough oil in) might have been the real culprit, and with the designer along would likely not have occurred at all.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 03:04
|
|
|
Epicurius posted:It's a weird historical quirk. Nathan Bedford Forrest III was the great grandson and namesake of a Confederate general. Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr. was the son and namesake of a Confederate general, and they were both US generals killed in WWII. I've got to say, that is certainly an... interesting name he has there. Especially since Simón Bolívar himself was very much against slavery. Is there a story behind that name beyond someone liking Bolívar?
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 03:53
|
|
|
Trin Tragula posted:I would like to use this as an incredibly thin excuse to repost one of my favourite bits of humourous writing, in which the author goes on a sailing trip with some friends; during one convivial evening they all start talking about what they did in the war and he muses on the ritualised performance of it all. This sort of creative embellishment of course continues long after the actual participants have died and their children take up the mantle, and not always to make grandpa look like more of a badass. For example I visited a distant uncle recently who recounted how our honourable ancestor was hung near to death by drat yankee carpetbaggers in 1865 as the American Civl War was ending. Of course I couldn't resist looking for more information- turns out the state genealogical society tells a slightly different tale, and has the court records to prove it. See at the time his family didn't accuse any northerners of the crime-but their neighbors long time neighbors. The crime never went to court, but the families continued feuding for many years, this was in the hill country of the border states you understand, and later two of the enemies were convicted of murdering another member of my kinfolk.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 04:53
|
|
|
Don Gato posted:I've got to say, that is certainly an... interesting name he has there. Especially since Simón Bolívar himself was very much against slavery. Is there a story behind that name beyond someone liking Bolívar? https://www.amazon.com/Our-Sister-Republics-American-Revolutions/dp/1631493175 HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Feb 22, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 05:01
|
|
|
Squalid posted:This sort of creative embellishment of course continues long after the actual participants have died and their children take up the mantle, and not always to make grandpa look like more of a badass. For example I visited a distant uncle recently who recounted how our honourable ancestor was hung near to death by drat yankee carpetbaggers in 1865 as the American Civl War was ending. Of course I couldn't resist looking for more information- turns out the state genealogical society tells a slightly different tale, and has the court records to prove it. See at the time his family didn't accuse any northerners of the crime-but their neighbors long time neighbors. The crime never went to court, but the families continued feuding for many years, this was in the hill country of the border states you understand, and later two of the enemies were convicted of murdering another member of my kinfolk. anyway, grades are in, and the only people who know a drat thing about the russian revolution and civil war are chinese-american or vietnamese-american. which is good for them because it implies that at least someone, somewhere, has learned something, but it's bad for me because that learning was obviously not done in this class. gently caress. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Feb 22, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 07:18
|
|
|
Don Gato posted:I've got to say, that is certainly an... interesting name he has there. Especially since Simón Bolívar himself was very much against slavery. Is there a story behind that name beyond someone liking Bolívar? To be fair, after listening to the Revolutions-podcasts about Simón Bolívar, I now know that at first he saw nothing wrong with slavery, and only after several failed attempts at revolution did he see the light. (After an exile on Haiti, I think. Seeing ex-slaves building a society apparently made him rethink a lot of things.) Maybe the Confederate general in question only liked the early Bolívar's adventures? 
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 08:20
|
|
|
Don Gato posted:I've got to say, that is certainly an... interesting name he has there. Especially since Simón Bolívar himself was very much against slavery. Is there a story behind that name beyond someone liking Bolívar? I don't think there is. Simon Bolivar Buckner'so father was born in 1823, which was when Bolivar was in the middle of his independence campaign, and Bolivar was pretty popular in the US at that time. There's actually a town named Bolivar, now in West Virginia, that was founded in 1825 and names after the South American leader.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 09:37
|
|
|
There's like eight towns in the US named after him, and one town named after another town named after him
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 10:01
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:You see this with all conflicts. It's not people being especially callous in not memorializing the dead of WW1 or raising it up as some kind of jingoistic notch in the "win" column, it's just the product of a century of distance between the conflict and today. We're well past the point where the people who lived and suffered through those times are around to anchor public memory of the event. gently caress, we're even getting close to losing the people who would have had to deal with parents who were shattered by the tragedy of those years. Once that personal connection is lost the war becomes just another bit of history. The dead become just another list of numbers that cap off wikipedia entries about battles. I think a huge part of how wars that have faded out of human memory is how they are covered in media. I suspect that 95% of people in the UK who know anything about the Napoleonic Wars know about it through Sharpe, for example. This is important in terms of WWI because since the 80's the defining (and pretty much only) major piece of media on WWI in Britain was Blackadder Goes Forth, which portrays WWI and everyone senior involved in an incredibly negative light. The teaching of it in schools revolved around how miserable an experience it was for the soldiers and how generally pointless the whole thing was too - British history teaching leans quite heavily on the concept of the Treaty of Versailles leading inevitably to WWII. This coloured pretty much all of the talk around The Great War in British culture - it was basically never talked about as anything other than a tragic and unnecessary waste of young men's lives. So when editiorials start cropping up in multiple places about how really we should be proud of what Britain did in WWI (I think Noted Thread Favourite Niall Ferguson was one of the canaries in the mine for this), it immediately makes my ears prick up becuase it's such a break from what came before. SeanBeansShako posted:Gross his withered claw hand is involved in Help For Heroes? Help For Heroes have a lot of problems beside that anyways - they basically don't admit the existence of PTSD or mental trauma at all, and certainly don't provide any assistance for veterans with those conditions (unlike the Legion).
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 10:13
|
|
|
MikeCrotch posted:Help For Heroes have a lot of problems beside that anyways - they basically don't admit the existence of PTSD or mental trauma at all, and certainly don't provide any assistance for veterans with those conditions (unlike the Legion). How big a shitlord do you have to be to call your organisation Help For Heroes then assert PTSD isn't a thing? Edit: but it appears they do have mental health support services: https://www.helpforheroes.org.uk/get-support/mental-health-and-wellbeing/hidden-wounds-service/ GotLag fucked around with this message at 10:30 on Feb 22, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 10:26
|
|
|
Gnoman posted:Not sure if this was a joke or not, but Grampa Simpson was never a vet of anything but WWII. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjmWU3U1wc8 They've got Skinner for the Vietnam war, anyway.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 10:58
|
|
|
MikeCrotch posted:This coloured pretty much all of the talk around The Great War in British culture - it was basically never talked about as anything other than a tragic and unnecessary waste of young men's lives.. After reading Sleepwalkers, I am even more convinced of the fact that the sheer pointlessness of WW1 is God's own truth. The war solved nothing for anyone and only created more misery.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 11:11
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:Yes, but when people started calling it the Great War that one hadn't happened yet. When they started calling it that it displaced the original 'great' war, which was the Napoleonic wars.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 11:53
|
|
|
MikeCrotch posted:So when editiorials start cropping up in multiple places about how really we should be proud of what Britain did in WWI (I think Noted Thread Favourite Niall Ferguson was one of the canaries in the mine for this), it immediately makes my ears prick up becuase it's such a break from what came before. Ferguson is very big on WWI having been a pointless waste of lives. Of course being who he is, he gets to this conclusion by arguing that Wilhelmine Germany was a peace-loving liberal utopia...
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 12:31
|
|
|
Kemper Boyd posted:After reading Sleepwalkers, I am even more convinced of the fact that the sheer pointlessness of WW1 is God's own truth. The war solved nothing for anyone and only created more misery. No but you see our Empire was enlightened and noble and had no alternative but to stand strongly against the insidious depredations of the villainous Hun and his sausage factory in Dar-es-Salaam
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 13:15
|
|
|
I think we can balance WWI being a pointless waste of human lives, and it being the product of what seemed at the time to be generally logical, even necessary decisions.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 13:17
|
|
|
Yeah every major power in WWI was acting totally rationally using the information they had at the time. What it led to is unfortunate but if you were put in the same situation with the same information you'd almost certainly make the same decisions.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 13:31
|
|
|
Gaius Marius posted:Yeah every major power in WWI was acting totally rationally using the information they had at the time. What it led to is unfortunate but if you were put in the same situation with the same information you'd almost certainly make the same decisions. I think this downplays the fact that there were actors in many of the major governments (Austria, Russia, Serbia, Germany and France) who were really clamouring for a war of some sort on the continent, and were using some pretty iffy logic to get there. There was a whole lot of "We have to go to war right now or we will inevitably be crushed in the future", in particular by France (looking at Germany) and Germany (looking at Russia). The fact that the war actually happened clouds the fact that there were people in all of these governments who did not want war and wanted to take no steps that would cause one, and it's probably quite likely that had the July Crisis passed the real warmongering politicians in at least some of the countries would have been forced out of office. I feel like WWI often falls into the same kinds of thinking as revolutions; they are impossible until they happen, at which point they were inevitable.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 14:02
|
|
|
MikeCrotch posted:I think this downplays the fact that there were actors in many of the major governments (Austria, Russia, Serbia, Germany and France) who were really clamouring for a war of some sort on the continent, and were using some pretty iffy logic to get there. There was a whole lot of "We have to go to war right now or we will inevitably be crushed in the future", in particular by France (looking at Germany) and Germany (looking at Russia).
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 14:20
|
|
|
I guess I am objecting more to the "X lives to move my drinks cabinet a few metres to the East" school of thought.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 14:28
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:Other old tank tales: is it true the first tanks didn't have exhaust pipes and would slowly gas their own crew with CO?
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 14:59
|
|
|
Reading Motivation in War right now, and between the author's descriptions of how the letters of common soldiers turned up in poorly labeled archives and the earlier discussion on the effects of strategic bombing on paperwork, I'm coming to think that the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark is both the nightmare and reality of most historians.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 15:03
|
|
|
HEY GUNS posted:I know a guy who studies ww2 in poland/west russia/"the borderlands" and this was what a lot of violence over there was like as well--people who knew one another killing one another under the aegis of the anti-nazi partisans or the pro-nazi local police (depending on who ended up where--sometimes having nothing to do with ideology). this is also the form the holocaust largely took in these areas; many of these places would rarely if ever see a german or you'd have a tiny wehrmacht presence for a huge swath of territory, so you'd get ethnically cleansed by people you knew You should check out the "bitching about students" thread over in SAE. Right now it's got a thread title about wiping student's asses. It's good for general educator war stories, but there's a lot of side-talk that goes on about effective teaching methodology. For what it's worth, if this is your first time teaching a class all of your own (as opposed to TA'ing someone else's course) it gets better. You know how you cringe like hell when you find some old piece of undergrad writing and feel a little embarrassed that your past self turned that in to a professor? Yeah, editing course materials for something I taught a few years ago to update it or another go around . .. yeeesh.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 15:09
|
|
|
Gaius Marius posted:I really wouldn't call it iffy logic at all. Russia was industrializing at an incredible rate and their population was booming. If Germany didn't strike they couldn't be sure they would be able to hold the Russians back. It's the same with France. I'm not saying the war was inevitable just that every actor has a clear logic to every decision they made. Russia also drat near had a revolution after the Japanese sank their navy.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 15:15
|
|
|
Gaius Marius posted:Yeah every major power in WWI was acting totally rationally using the information they had at the time. What it led to is unfortunate but if you were put in the same situation with the same information you'd almost certainly make the same decisions. I mean, for one, I wouldn't be in position to make those decisions in the first place. But, second, there's an implied step here, which is "Assuming I had the same goals as they (which, uh, yeah, no), the same general idea of what is acceptable and what isn't in pursuing those goals (a lot of decisions are basically calculated gambles, and consideration of what was being seen as acceptable risks and losses for what odds, and how those odds and risks are, for lack of a better word, calculated, absolutely must not be avoided), had the same general worldview that processes the information I get as they (some of it is implied in being a person living in that particular social environment at the time, but a lot of it isn't), the same people alongside to share in decision making and account for (again, major decisions made by just one person mostly independently of what others think are fairly rare), and that none of the things that history failed (or chose not) to record actually matter (admittedly, this one can probably be waived since it's kind of hard to account for it what with it being impossible to know)" MikeCrotch posted:I think this downplays the fact that there were actors in many of the major governments (Austria, Russia, Serbia, Germany and France) who were really clamouring for a war of some sort on the continent, and were using some pretty iffy logic to get there. There was a whole lot of "We have to go to war right now or we will inevitably be crushed in the future", in particular by France (looking at Germany) and Germany (looking at Russia). The government of Serbia was very much not interested in having a war then and there (though it certainly made its fair share of absolutely horrifying decisions in the period preceding the war). MikeCrotch posted:The fact that the war actually happened clouds the fact that there were people in all of these governments who did not want war and wanted to take no steps that would cause one, and it's probably quite likely that had the July Crisis passed the real warmongering politicians in at least some of the countries would have been forced out of office. I feel like WWI often falls into the same kinds of thinking as revolutions; they are impossible until they happen, at which point they were inevitable. It also ignores the views and actions of the public, both the pro war and anti war kind.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 16:31
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:These things are the "motor-sledges" Scott used in his last antarctic expedition. They were not tested very well (due to financial and time pressure) and had mechanical issues until the engines or transmissions would frag themselves. The main problem they had (and I wanted to learn more about this, because it is baffling) is - engine overheating. In -30 C weather. Comrade Gorbash posted:IIRC the main issue is that there wasn't sufficient ventilation. The ambient temperature is pretty quickly overwhelmed if you trap a volume of air around a heat source in a metal box. Basically this. The Wolseley motor-sledges were air-cooled (because you wouldn't want a water-cooled engine in the Antarctic when glycol hadn't been invented!). They were tested in Norway and ran perfectly, but continually overheated in the Antarctic. Partly it was because they were worked much harder than in tests, each dragging two sledges weighing 1.5 tons a piece, and for very long period of time (partly because one Sledge was lost overboard when being unloaded from the Terra Nova). The design of the engines themselves was rather primitive (although state of the art for the time) - inside the engine compartment there was no ducting, just a six-blade fan belt-driven by the engine blowing air over the entire engine (instead of the air being directed onto the cylinders and heads by ducts as it would be on a modern air-cooled engine). The Wolseley engineers had, naturally, been more concerned with the engine running too cold than too hot so the engine compartment was designed to insulate the engine as much as possible, being almost entirely sealed apart from an adjustable vent in the front (the air intake) and a series of vents in the bottom (to allow the air to leave). Despite having a self-heating and vapourising intake system (where the intake manifold is cast in one piece with the exhaust), the carburettor air intake being pre-warmed by the exhaust and a heat shield being provided to try and maintain warm air around the carburettor, the engines were a nightmare to start each morning, needed blow-lamps played along the entire intake tract, oil-soaked rags placed around the carburettor and lit on fire and paraffin stoves placed under the oil sumps to coax them into life. Other causes of the overheating were a tendency for the air outlet vents in the base of the engine compartment to clog with snow and ice (restricting the through-flow of air even more) and then Bernard Day (the motor mechanics') natural attempt at a solution, which was to remove the engine casing all together (which is how the Motor Sledges had been when tested without any issues in Norway because the design hadn't been finalised). Unfortunately this meant that any airflow generated by the fan just went all over the place, even less of it flowed over the engine and it made the problem worse. There was also the issue of the extreme dryness of the Antarctic air. Water is a much better conductor of heat than air (something like 20x better), so even in an 'air cooled' engine a lot of the cooling effect is being done by the moisture content of the air being blown over the engine rather than the mere low temperature of the air itself. So, seemingly paradoxically, air-cooled engines actually need far more cooling in very cold weather than they do in more temperate conditions. The Wolseley engineers hadn't appreciated that and the phenomenon wasn't realised until the failure of the Motor Sledges was reported back to them. The endless (and terminal) problems with the final drive gears, drive shafts and transmission casings breaking were also due to insufficient allowance being made for how brittle metals become at very low temperatures and the extra load being put on the Sledges. Scott (and Wolseley) were taking what was still a very primitive technology into one of the toughest places on Earth. They had made all the allowances their experience and conjecture allowed for but it wasn't enough. That doesn't explain why the Motor Sledges had no steering though - they could only drive in straight lines at one of two (very slow) speeds. To change course they had carriage-style shafts attached to the front and would be lugged by teams of men on ropes onto the new heading. Which seems ludicrously difficult and pointless given that the idea of differential steering and braking was well-known at the time. Some more details on the Motor Sledges: https://www.britishmotormuseum.co.uk/news/archive-news/october-2016-2 A report on the overheating issue from Commercial Motor, 1913: http://archive.commercialmotor.com/article/20th-february-1913/1/scott-and-his-sledges Edit: Just caught up with the rest of the page and Comrade Gorbash said all the same thing but more succinctly... BalloonFish fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Feb 22, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 16:39
|
|
|
In WWI-related vidya-game-imitating-life comedy, Battlefield 1 has a Gallipoli map and it's basically impossible by design for the ANZAC landing forces to take V Beach. Against all the concessions in favor of gameplay that game makes, it's like someone in the dev shop put their foot down and demanded that a whole generation of players grow up learning how big of a fuckup Gallipoli was. The game doesn't really touch on the larger Dardanelles clusterfuck, but it does point out that the British Empire had their dick in a meat grinder for months without even getting past their first day's operational plans and Churchill's career in the Admiralty was basically over after that.  the kids are gonna be all right
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 16:49
|
|
|
my dad posted:The government of Serbia was very much not interested in having a war then and there (though it certainly made its fair share of absolutely horrifying decisions in the period preceding the war). I guess I shouldn't have said they wanted a war, but at the same time the Serbian government was seemingly completely unwilling to curb the Black Hand or any Serbian nationalist movements regardless of what they were up to in Austria-Hungary. I think Nicola Pasic said something along the lines of "The Serbian government cannot quell the passions of young Serbs" whenever anything happened.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 16:52
|
|
|
It is time for my annual email to the mayor and city council of Brooksville, Florida. I encourage everyone here to send something to this wonderfully diverse and enlightened group of southern politicians regarding the namesake of their town. emails etc available here: http://www.ci.brooksville.fl.us/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=27&Itemid=30
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 16:54
|
|
|
MikeCrotch posted:I guess I shouldn't have said they wanted a war, but at the same time the Serbian government was seemingly completely unwilling to curb the Black Hand or any Serbian nationalist movements regardless of what they were up to in Austria-Hungary. I think Nicola Pasic said something along the lines of "The Serbian government cannot quell the passions of young Serbs" whenever anything happened. To some degree he was correct. Serbs (and a lot of other Slavs Austria suspected Serbia of agitating among) didn't exactly need convincing to oppose Austria-Hungary, Austria-Hungary was doing a good enough job convincing them on its own. The Black Hand was good at intimidating politicians and arranging unfortunate accidents for socialists at home, but its involvement in AH can at best be described as incompetent chucklefuckery that somehow accidentally actually caused something they had no idea what to do with through sheer bloody minded persistence in giving a little bit of help to everyone willing to stir trouble. You're absolutely correct about Serbian government playing dumb regardless of its involvement or not. One of the results of which was that my dad fucked around with this message at 17:09 on Feb 22, 2018 |
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 17:07
|
|
|
Gaius Marius posted:I really wouldn't call it iffy logic at all. Russia was industrializing at an incredible rate and their population was booming. If Germany didn't strike they couldn't be sure they would be able to hold the Russians back. It's the same with France. I'm not saying the war was inevitable just that every actor has a clear logic to every decision they made. But this is only important if you accept the German High Command axiom that a war in Europe was necessary at some point to establish Germany's rightful place in the Great Power hierarchy. Once the mobilisation train started rolling everyone's logic falls quite rapidly to 'mobilise now, and fight while you are mobilised' but there was only one group in Europe that was actively pushing 'lets mobilise before anyone else and have a war right now!'.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 17:14
|
|
|
Alchenar posted:Once the mobilisation train started rolling everyone's logic falls quite rapidly to 'mobilise now, and fight while you are mobilised' but there was only one group in Europe that was actively pushing 'lets mobilise before anyone else and have a war right now!'. the Russians?
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 17:23
|
|
|
StandardVC10 posted:the Russians? The Austrians? god dammit In any case I've come around to the opinion that Imperial Germany acted more or less rationally and reasonably. As did most other participants.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 17:33
|
|
|
bewbies posted:The Austrians? Sure, if they were playing a Paradox game where the goal was to get to the top of an arbitrary list, and they didn't really care too much about those pixelmen they were using.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 17:39
|
|
|
bewbies posted:In any case I've come around to the opinion that Imperial Germany acted more or less rationally and reasonably. As did most other participants. ehhhhhhhh ehhhhhhhhhhh okay, so, their stance toward France was basically "cede us your border fortifications so we can fight Russia without you being able to help them" it's hard not to see that as a rather blatant provocation
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 17:41
|
|
|
Panzeh posted:ehhhhhhhh In turn, it is hard not to see the entente as a direct threat to undermine German security. Point being you can take this stuff well back into the 19th century and even before, like when some Prussian secretary misspelled a word on a memorandum and that's what set this whole thing in motion. Provided you don't put on your sophisticated 21st century glasses and judge them with those, it is actually pretty easy to understand the motivation and actions of all those guys.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 17:46
|
|
|
BalloonFish posted:Some more details on the Motor Sledges: Cool, thanks guys! It is only tangentially war related, but wondering about these things are the little burrs my mind collects.
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 18:04
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 17:45 |
|
|
Panzeh posted:ehhhhhhhh That was already quite late in the process though The Imperial Germany government was also admittedly having to deal with the lovely hand it had been dealt diplomatically after One Handed Willy summarily shitcanned Bismarck in a fit of pique
|
|
#
?
Feb 22, 2018 18:08
|
|