Nebakenezzer posted:

Hunt11 posted:

That still seems more sane then what Ensign posted as at least that super sub knows what it wants to be.

Nenonen posted:

What differs the most is everything else in the battlefield and how it reflects to pikeman equipment and tactics. The phalanx faced sling bullets and arrows, so they carried armour and shields. Early modern pikemen faced musket balls and you don't really have any meaningful protection against that. I

Siivola posted:

Equipping soldiers with both pikes and armour costs money, is my guess.

feedmegin posted:

Though, interestingly, early early modern pikemen were armoured; that got dropped over time. I wonder why; not like muskets improved in penetration that much over the 17th century.

13th KRRC War Diary, 20th August 1918 posted:

A busy day organising. At 6 p.m. Btn. H.Q. moved into TOP TRENCH at F 21 d.
At 11 p.m. Coys. commenced to move into assembly positions for the attack. Scope of attacks, and orders are appended.
Notification that zero hour was to be 4.55 a.m. 21st inst was received at 8.30 p.m.

Phanatic posted:

HEAT jet

feedmegin posted:

Though, interestingly, early early modern pikemen were armoured; that got dropped over time. I wonder why; not like muskets improved in penetration that much over the 17th century.

Cyrano4747 posted:

I don't know about that last bit, but Hitler's Beneficiaries goes deep on how the redistribution of Jewish property helped get buy in from the general population. Wages of destruction isn't narrowly about the Holocaust, but it goes hard into how the Nazi economy ran. The two compliment each other really well.

Browning also gets into the how and why of the Holocaust coming about as a phenomena, which gets into implementation indirectly.

A younger historian, Beorn, also has a pair of books that might be of use to you. The Holocaust in Eastern Europe is more of an overview, but he gets into the way that policies developed and changed over time. I haven't read this one yet, but its been well received.

Beorn also has one on how the Wehrmacht, specifically, orchestrated its involvement. Marching into Darkness. That also might get at what you're wondering about. It's also a great slam dunk on the Clean Wehrmacht.

Out of curiosity who were you chatting with?

Some academic metareviewer posted:

Black Earth is in many ways a response to the discussion provoked by Bloodlands; it is Snyder’s answer to some of the objections raised to his ways of looking at the Holocaust as it was carried out in Eastern Europe. But typically – and to his credit – Snyder attempts to use Black Earth to expand his own and our understanding of the Holocaust and to analyze its importance for the contemporary world. A fascinating characteristic of his work and thinking in general is that Snyder typically responds to criticisms by digging more deeply into the meaning of his work and exploring even more broadly its implications for scholarly inquiry. He does the same in the following, where his answer to the three reviews, but particularly to Eric Weitz’s criticisms, not only restates and defends, but amplifies his ideas about the sources of the Holocaust. It is apparent that Snyder has been thinking about the critique of his ideas about the destruction of the state in the east and the coming of the Holocaust that have appeared in a number of reviews by German and Holocaust historians.

Black Earth has several distinct yet interlocking parts. First there is an explication of German dictator Adolf Hitler’s worldview, his anti-Semitism, which was linked to anti-Bolshevism, and his fierce desire to conquer Lebensraum for the Germans. Second, Snyder explores elements of the history of eastern Poland (western Belarus and western Ukraine) and the Baltic states that he believes are essential for our understanding of the Final Solution: the linkages between Polish Zionism and the Polish government’s efforts to be rid of the Jews by sending them to Palestine; the effects of the ‘double occupation’ (Soviet and then Nazi) and state destruction on the dynamics of collaboration and mass murder in the region; and the efforts of some Polish (and other) underground groups and individuals to aid the Jews. The final part of Snyder’s argument – the conclusion – broaches, in an unusual exhortation, the ways in which Snyder believes the Holocaust teaches us lessons about the threats represented by global warming and environmental catastrophe.

Some reviewers of Black Earth, the CUNY historian Eric Weitz is one, believe the book has too many moving parts. Weitz complains in particular about the inclusion of issues having to do with the development of cooperation between Revisionist Zionists and some Polish political figures. Snyder responds that understanding the Polish backdrop to the Final Solution is essential in coming to terms with the importance of the destruction of the Polish state in the mass murder of the Polish Jews.

Weitz also criticizes Snyder’s incorporation of the “ecology” topos for understanding Hitler; he thinks this is little more than a jazzy update of a well-known set of concepts applied in the earlier historiography to the Third Reich. Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian of science, takes Snyder’s ecological “warnings” very seriously. She points out, as does Snyder, that Hitler used and abused science as a way to rationalize his expansionist aims and murderous policies, ignoring the real possibilities that legitimate science offered to solve Germany’s resource and food problems. She agrees with Snyder’s reading of “environmental anxiety” built into the Holocaust and worries, as does he, that future climate change contains the potentiality of producing scapegoats and demands for victims. She also finds compelling his emphasis on the importance of the state and state structures for protecting individuals, like the Jews, during the war. She is ready to transfer that argument to the present, as is he, and underlines the potentially critical role of the state in protecting human life, property, and prosperity against the destructive results of climate change.

Serhy Yekelchyk, a Ukrainian-Canadian historian of Ukraine, appreciates Snyder’s emphasis on a “political argument” for understanding the extent of local collaboration with the Holocaust in eastern Poland (western Ukraine and western Belarus) and the Baltic states by focusing on the dynamics of the double occupation. That some Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, et al. participated both in pogroms against the Jews immediately following the Soviet occupation and then in the mass executions by the Nazis that began in earnest in the late summer of 1941, was not a product of “traditional anti-Semitism and [a] proclivity for communal violence,” writes Yekelchyk, but the result of the double-occupation, whereby especially local former Soviet collaborators wanted to prove their bonafides to the Nazis by killing Jews. Snyder’s argument on this question, originally articulated by Jan Tomasz Gross in his work, is hard to prove statistically.[2] But it no doubt rings true in some cases, that of the Latvian commando chief and collaborator, Viktors Arājs, one of the most prominent. Yet, as Yekelchyk points out, in areas of the Soviet Union that were not independent before the war and therefore were not subject to double occupation, the bulk of Ukraine and Belarus as prime examples, locals did not seem any less disposed to participating in the Holocaust than in those regions that were doubly occupied. The most deadly massacre associated with the Holocaust, Babyn Yar (Babi Yar), took place almost seventy-five years ago (September 29 and 30, 1941), costing the lives of some 34,000 Jews. The killing was carried out, as was usually the case, by the Germans, their SS leadership, and their police firing squads. But local Ukrainians sometimes sympathized with the Nazi actions against the Jews and participated in auxiliary police battalions that were involved, if not directly in executing Jews, then in maintaining order and collecting clothes and valuables from the victims.

HEY GUNS posted:

Can you say what you mean by system dynamics and how that works? I ask because I'm thinking of doing my second big research project on early modern military/financial social networks.

Siivola posted:

Equipping soldiers with both pikes and armour costs money, is my guess.

HEY GUNS posted:

remember how heavy your pike was? now do that wearing a breastplate and backplate

Tevery Best posted:

Because pike blocks become a big thing in the 14th century more or less, and at that point you still see a lot of other projectile weapons, like bows and crossbows. By the 17th century pretty much nobody uses those anymore, so the armour becomes an expensive luxury that serves little practical purpose.

HEY GUNS posted:

remember how heavy your pike was? now do that wearing a breastplate and backplate

Fangz posted:

A simple cuirass is surely much less expensive than earlier plate armour? You are less concerned about leaving gaps that might be exploited by a melee opponent, and adding points of articulation - what you have is a lot closer to a slab of metal.

Siivola posted:

The plates are going to fit poorly and hang entirely on my shoulders, aren't they?

JcDent posted:

But you said it was cheaper way back when

Also, dude, I know I already asked about it, but what exactly happens in what is erroneously called "push of pike"?

Fangz posted:

A simple cuirass is surely much less expensive than earlier plate armour? You are less concerned about leaving gaps that might be exploited by a melee opponent, and adding points of articulation - what you have is a lot closer to a slab of metal.

HEY GUNS posted:

edit 2: When units start running out of money cavalrymen will pawn their pistols, but that's not their only weapon. When the regiment I study deserted they sold their weapons, but they were all leaving.

HEY GUNS posted:

The opposing blocks' pikemen lower their pikes to the charge and advance toward each other. When they get to pike distance they start trying to stab each other, like fencing with very long pieces of wood. Think a giant game of pick-up-sticks more than the stereotypical phalanx shoving.

Siivola posted:

Compare the civil war era armour on the left to the armour of Christian I, some decades earlier:

The basic shape of the breastplate has remained the same, Christian's armour just includes more bits.

So in a sense you're correct that the cuirass alone is cheaper, but that's only because you're not buying all the extras.

JcDent posted:

I feel like I'd desire to have a breastplate if this comes to pass. I can hardly see how you can defend yourself in the act of pike-fencing.

Fangz posted:

On the phalanxes vs pikes question, I seem to recall the theory that classical hoplites and phalangites fought in much closer formation than early modern pikes, but I'm not sure if this is based on anything concrete. Hegel, your guys would be too far apart to lock their shields together (if they had any) right?

JcDent posted:

I feel like I'd desire to have a breastplate if this comes to pass. I can hardly see how you can defend yourself in the act of pike-fencing.

Did Greeks get a lot closer? What about Macedonians?

Fangz posted:

I'm also thinking in terms of how well they are designed to fit and how the weight is distributed.

Tevery Best posted:

Because pike blocks become a big thing in the 14th century more or less, and at that point you still see a lot of other projectile weapons, like bows and crossbows. By the 17th century pretty much nobody uses those anymore, so the armour becomes an expensive luxury that serves little practical purpose.

Mr Enderby posted:

Speaking of ECW armor: there's a great description by Richard Atkyns, a historian and Royalist cavalry commander, of trying to take down the heavily -armored Sir Arthur Haselrig, who commanded the London Lobsters, a regiment of Parliamentarian cuirassiers, at the battle of Roundway Down.

...I then immediately struck into him, and touched him before I discharged mine; and I’m sure I hit him, for he staggered, and presently wheeled off from his party and ran… I came up to him, and discharged the other pistol at him, and I’m sure I hit his head, for I touched it before I gave fire, and it amazed him at that present, but he was too well armed all over for a pistol bullet to do him any hurt…
In this nick of time came up Mr Holmes to my assistance, and went up to him with great resolution, and felt him before he discharged his pistol, though I saw him hit him, ‘twas but a flea-biting to him…
Then came in Captain Buck and discharged his pistol onto him also, but with the same success as before…

It’s quite a long account, and it gets pretty comical as Haselrig charges around being impossible to kill. Eventually Haselrig's horse dies from blood loss, but he gets rescued before he can surrender. It's even funnier given Haselrig's reputation as a good-natured idiot.

Ataxerxes posted:

There was some book about the ECW that had king James I say, when he heard of the event, "had he been sufficiently provisioned he would have withstood a seven year siege by himself" or something along those lines. I think the book mentioned Haselrig using the archaic but very heavy armor of his father or grandfather.

poisonpill posted:

Hmmm

It is strange to think about how close in time Elizabeth/James were to Charles I/II. They feel like different worlds but it was barely a generation

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

how is anyone that dumb

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

Because they're an op-ed writer.