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Which is why they could have won in 38. They had an ally with a strong military posed to halt the bulk of the Wehrmacht, while the French could have wiped out their reserves and mobilize Poland to strike into their heart.
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Oct 5, 2018 23:33
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The allies barely wanted to declare war on Germany, they aren't going to do the suicidal move of picking a war with the USSR at the same time.
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Oct 5, 2018 23:38
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The Soviet Union traded with the USA, but did they trade with UK, France or their Empires in the 30s?
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Oct 5, 2018 23:41
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Why do you think the USSR would have declared war over Czechoslovakia? The USSR was the one country that actually pitched the idea of a joint protection pact. Note I said 38, not 39.
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Oct 5, 2018 23:42
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Fangz posted:The allies barely wanted to declare war on Germany, they aren't going to do the suicidal move of picking a war with the USSR at the same time. Yeah, you need to remember just how much everyone but hitler wanted to avoid WW2 at all loving costs. WW1 was massively traumatic to everyone and the general assumption was that 1940 was basically going to be 1917 electric boogaloo: this time with bigger artillery. There were people who seriously thought about continuity of government in very Cold War WMD-esque terms because they flat out assumed that the first step of a war would be long-range bombers dumping hundreds of thousands of tons of chemical weapons on the capitols.
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Oct 5, 2018 23:43
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So why didn't massive strategic chemical bombing happen? Was there a practical limitation of some sort, or was not even Hitler willing to be that big a bastard? Or was it a MAD-esque situation of nobody wanting to start poo poo because of the retaliation?
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Oct 5, 2018 23:54
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Geisladisk posted:So why didn't massive strategic chemical bombing happen? Was there a practical limitation of some sort, or was not even Hitler willing to be that big a bastard? Or was it a MAD-esque situation of nobody wanting to start poo poo because of the retaliation? Supposedly Hitler had a personal aversion to gas warfare, being a veteran of WW1. The Americans planned massive strategic chemical bombing as a part of the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands, but chose to employ the atomic bomb instead. And yes, the British and Americans both feared that if they employed gas on a large scale, it would invite retaliation.
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Oct 6, 2018 00:00
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What are the threads' thoughts on Ordinary Men? Author popped back up in the news with his recent essay.
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Oct 6, 2018 00:08
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The British tested poison gas anti-tank weapons extensively, they turned out to be quite effective, but never deployed.
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Oct 6, 2018 00:13
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brugroffil posted:What are the threads' thoughts on Ordinary Men? Author popped back up in the news with his recent essay. It's excellent. One of the best books on perpetrators in the Holocaust. Browning's other works are also highly regarded. Dude is considered one of the top holocaust historians in the US for a reason.
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Oct 6, 2018 00:18
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Geisladisk posted:So why didn't massive strategic chemical bombing happen? Was there a practical limitation of some sort, or was not even Hitler willing to be that big a bastard? Or was it a MAD-esque situation of nobody wanting to start poo poo because of the retaliation? In addition to the threat of retaliation, massive strategic bombing offensives took a bit more work and resources than people had previously expected. No belligerent air force would have actually been able to pull something like that off on day one of World War II. Or at least, not very well.
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Oct 6, 2018 00:29
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Geisladisk posted:So why didn't massive strategic chemical bombing happen? Was there a practical limitation of some sort, or was not even Hitler willing to be that big a bastard? Or was it a MAD-esque situation of nobody wanting to start poo poo because of the retaliation? Both sides developed them but had the ”lets not open the pandoras box this time” mentality until the end. Churchill was all about gassing the poo poo out of Germany but rest of his staff werent. British actually had a cargo ship filled with mustard gas artillery rounds explode in Italian port which caused a major ”this never happened” campaign https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_raid_on_Bari check under ”John Harvey”
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Oct 6, 2018 00:58
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I can't fuckin' believe I missed the snake derail.
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Oct 6, 2018 03:49
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SlothfulCobra posted:I can't fuckin' believe I missed the snake derail. It was pretty solid.
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Oct 6, 2018 03:57
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SlothfulCobra posted:I can't fuckin' believe I missed the snake derail. that's what you get for being slothful
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Oct 6, 2018 05:01
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Not to continue the snake derail, but my father has a snake story (actually mostly on-topic, even*): One chilly winter morning in 1970-71 somewhere in South Vietnam, he went out for his morning stroll, and almost stepped on a lil' snake. Being from rural Texas and knowing that most snakes aren't assholes, especially when temperatures are low (with a very few exceptions around here, and even those basically dare you to fight them, if you leave them alone they'll leave you alone), and even the not-so-nice ones are good for pest control, he gave it a nudge with the toe of his boot and it looked up at him, then slithered off into the brush alongside the trail. One of the locals he was "advising" flipped his poo poo and ran toward Dad, screaming "NUMBER 10 SNAKE!" in the pidgin they used to communicate when the interpreters weren't handy. Eventually got the guy calmed down, got the interpreter over, and yeah, it was one of those SE Asian snaked mentioned previously that has a bad reputation because it kills you in minutes if you're more than a minor annoyance/worth the waste of energy in the morning, and it WAS just a baby (less than a foot long). Dad never got the exact species, but the locals were terrified of it. But Dad just said to it (obviously no words were exchanged, but from the nudges and stares this is what they would have said) "Yo, snake, I almost accidentally squished you, watch where you're basking next time, we that use this trail are way too big for you to eat." And the snake said "Wha? Sure, whatevs, I'll nap somewhere else." I mean, when it comes right down to it it's just a matter of courtesy between professional killers. We have different targets, we'll agree to stay out of each others' way.  *Never take military anecdotes at face value, but never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Speaking of talking to animals, the Montagnards Dad worked with claimed they understood the language of the monkeys. Not in a racist way, I mean they lived in that jungle and the monkeys were their early-warning system, of course they'd learn what all the monkey calls meant, just like they learned enough French and English words to work with their advisors. Even the white city boys fresh off the boat knew that the jungle going quiet meant poo poo was about to get real, but the Montagnyards listened to the monkeys talking to each other after the usual din of jungle wildlife stopped, and translated it for the Americans. And gave pretty accurate numbers. Of course, company vs. battalion can be be easily decoded by how worried the monkeys sound, so they probably didn't so much translate the monkeyspeak as knowing that "poo poo's about to go down, move away" and "FUCKIN' LEG IT MATE!" are two different calls. But I wouldn't put it past some of the older guys.
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Oct 6, 2018 06:14
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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In my experince most locals will kill a snake and then ID it in areas with extremely venomous snakes. Its not worth the risk for them which i can get when you need to do back track through the same trail after ten straight hours of brush clearing and survey. My two local crewmen went crazy to kill a baby (length of an index finger) snake that turned out to be a python.
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Oct 6, 2018 06:21
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Telsa Cola posted:
Fortunately not, although I didn't have to anything more than trivial bushwacking so I had the luxury of not having to touch much. It's kind of shocking to go into a tropical forest and realize literally nothing is safe to touch, even the stuff that isn't thorny or poisonous is covered in ants and termites. In fact an early piece of advice given to a lot of techs is that if you slip and fall on a narrow trail, DO NOT grab anything to steady yourself, you're safer just falling because as often as not the closest thing to hand will look like this:  and I saw someone spend a whole afternoon pulling these things out of their hand with pliers. Much more so than snakes or nasty plants what I really worried about was bullet ants, UGH. Real cool finding one of those inch long fuckers trundling up your sleeve knowing a bite will leave you debilitated with agony all day and still feeling like poo poo for the rest of the week. Spiteful bastards. edit: I wrote this this morning and it apparently wasn't posted? Just going ahead and posting now anyway. Scariest poo poo I ever had to deal with in the forest was giant centipedes. You HEAR the motherfuckers skittering long before you see them Squalid fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Oct 6, 2018 |
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Oct 6, 2018 06:24
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Squalid posted:Fortunately not, although I didn't have to anything more than trivial bushwacking so I had the luxury of not having to touch much. It's kind of shocking to go into a tropical forest and realize literally nothing is safe to touch... In fact an early piece of advice given to a lot of techs is that if you slip and fall on a narrow trail, DO NOT grab anything to steady yourself, you're safer just falling because as often as not the closest thing to hand will look like There's a reason the Nurburgring is called "Green Hell". It's by comparison to the actual green Hell of the Amazon basin.
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Oct 6, 2018 08:11
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brugroffil posted:What are the threads' thoughts on Ordinary Men? Author popped back up in the news with his recent essay. i liked the book, i hated the stanford prison experiment and i believe it was a sham. it's a shame such a good book relies on such a terrible "study," and it's a shame that study was used as it was elsewhere
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Oct 6, 2018 10:08
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDGDw4GWcf4 Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner set to period footage from the Congo
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Oct 6, 2018 11:30
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HEY GUNS posted:i liked the book, i hated the stanford prison experiment and i believe it was a sham. it's a shame such a good book relies on such a terrible "study," and it's a shame that study was used as it was elsewhere I wonder how many papers out there hit all of Stanford, Milgram, and SLA Marshall.
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Oct 6, 2018 13:56
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P-Mack posted:I wonder how many papers out there hit all of Stanford, Milgram, and SLA Marshall. I showed up half in the bag for class one time and ranted at a freshman for using Grossman in their paper about military violence or something like that. The prof liked my act.
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Oct 6, 2018 14:25
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P-Mack posted:I wonder how many papers out there hit all of Stanford, Milgram, and SLA Marshall.
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Oct 6, 2018 14:41
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Forgotten Weapons has been doing some neat historical videos as part of Ian's trip to France, here's a look inside a German WWI bunker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkQsKL-dbMM I thought the quiet part was intentional muting at first but it appears to be a technical issue, here's the transcript of that part: Ian McCollum posted:I personally think that there's just a really tremendous contrast in these places between what remains of these fighting positions and the nature that has grown up around them in the hundred years since these places were actually occupied and used.
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Oct 6, 2018 14:44
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HEY GUNS posted:i liked the book, i hated the stanford prison experiment and i believe it was a sham. it's a shame such a good book relies on such a terrible "study," and it's a shame that study was used as it was elsewhere Zimbardo is a lunatic, surprised he is taken so seriously.
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Oct 6, 2018 19:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:It's excellent. One of the best books on perpetrators in the Holocaust. Browning's other works are also highly regarded. Dude is considered one of the top holocaust historians in the US for a reason. Ordinary Men is $1.99 on the Kindle store right now. The Stanford Prison Experiment was a bad idea poorly executed. Zimbardo at least has the decency to admit that he hosed up badly. His book, The Lucifer Effect, is a really interesting study of his own mistakes. He was an expert witness in the Abu Ghraib trials and that is a very interesting story.
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Oct 6, 2018 20:03
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Squalid posted:Fortunately not, although I didn't have to anything more than trivial bushwacking so I had the luxury of not having to touch much. It's kind of shocking to go into a tropical forest and realize literally nothing is safe to touch, even the stuff that isn't thorny or poisonous is covered in ants and termites. In fact an early piece of advice given to a lot of techs is that if you slip and fall on a narrow trail, DO NOT grab anything to steady yourself, you're safer just falling because as often as not the closest thing to hand will look like this: Ah yes, Poke-no-boys as the locals call em where I work. In some areas they grow, then die and fall over in mats, making spiky roofs you have to duck or crawl under. It sucks because the thorns catch on everything. My worse bug experience was with one of those spiky, venomous caterpillars, got slapped in the face with a branch with one on it and it basically felt like I got hit by stinging nettle. Im glad it missed the eye.
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Oct 6, 2018 21:08
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13th KRRC War Diary, 6th October 1918 posted:During the night 5/6th patrolling was carried out continuously but none succeeded in reaching the enemy trench line. The enemy used very lights with great freedom and kept up intermittent M.G. and shell fire on our positions and on the ridge between the lines.
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Oct 6, 2018 23:58
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HEY GUNS posted:"true human beings hate violence; only the structural factors that turn us into monsters and slavish obedience to our authority figures make us likely to fire into the air in the general direction of an enemy" Swoon-worthy.
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Oct 7, 2018 02:12
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StandardVC10 posted:In addition to the threat of retaliation, massive strategic bombing offensives took a bit more work and resources than people had previously expected. No belligerent air force would have actually been able to pull something like that off on day one of World War II. Or at least, not very well. There was also a sudden change in technology just before the war began. In the early 30s, bomber aircraft were, as a rule, always faster than fighters, as you could put more and larger engines in them. This led to the belief that "the bomber will always get through (and carpet bomb your city in poison)." A bunch of technological innovation right before the war changed this. Suddenly fighters were as fast as bombers, but obviously the strategic implications of this weren't obvious until the war actually started. I've simplified this a lot though and people have posted about this itt many times who know far more about ww2 aviation than I do, so I might have got things a little backwards.
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Oct 7, 2018 02:35
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Splode posted:There was also a sudden change in technology just before the war began. In the early 30s, bomber aircraft were, as a rule, always faster than fighters, as you could put more and larger engines in them. This led to the belief that "the bomber will always get through (and carpet bomb your city in poison)." Fighter performance was part of it, but radar was huge. Made it much easier to direct defenders to an attack as it developed.
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Oct 7, 2018 03:34
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I think it was this thread chatting about Toyotomi Hideyoshi earlier. I just visited Osaka Castle and, man, the ego on this guy... Anyway, I've read Taiko, but is there a good work of non-fiction anyone would recommend? Hideyoshi is the most interesting to me but I'd be open to a broader look that covers all the unifiers of that time period.
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Oct 7, 2018 03:48
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StandardVC10 posted:Fighter performance was part of it, but radar was huge. Made it much easier to direct defenders to an attack as it developed. Quite true, but then they made better bombers and the cycle started over. "The bomber always gets through" lasted well into the Cold War until modern surface-to-air missiles came into play -- the giant, lumbering B-36 could out-turn any fighter sent after it at the time, because at 60,000 feet the air's so thin that the little hotrod fighters' control surfaces couldn't do poo poo. The B-36's rudder and ailerons were the size of a fighter's wings, and it turned just fine.
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Oct 7, 2018 11:42
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StandardVC10 posted:Fighter performance was part of it, but radar was huge. Made it much easier to direct defenders to an attack as it developed. Oh yeah that's a good point. Who, other than the UK, had radar at the beginning of the war, and how fast did it disseminate?
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Oct 7, 2018 11:49
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Splode posted:Oh yeah that's a good point. Everyone "had radar" at the start of the war. The issue is that it was essentially just Great Britain and to a lesser extent the US that had developed deployable, functional radar sets instead of still fiddling with it at an experimental level. There was the additional issue of radar not being integrated into doctrine, or even trusted as a reliable source of information. It was Britain, particularly during the Battle of Britain that really showed what radar could do when integrated into your air defense network.
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Oct 7, 2018 13:21
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Chillbro Baggins posted:Quite true, but then they made better bombers and the cycle started over. "The bomber always gets through" lasted well into the Cold War until modern surface-to-air missiles came into play -- the giant, lumbering B-36 could out-turn any fighter sent after it at the time, because at 60,000 feet the air's so thin that the little hotrod fighters' control surfaces couldn't do poo poo. The B-36's rudder and ailerons were the size of a fighter's wings, and it turned just fine. Yes but a key part If the philosophy was that the said bomber could just end the war by demolishing the opponent until they submitted. Even the allied air offensive in Europe failed on that, Although the A-bombs can be claimed to have vindicated the idea.
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Oct 7, 2018 13:25
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Valtonen posted:Yes but a key part If the philosophy was that the said bomber could just end the war by demolishing the opponent until they submitted. Even the allied air offensive in Europe failed on that, Although the A-bombs can be claimed to have vindicated the idea. It sorta comes down to how many resources you can throw at bombers vs how much industry total the enemy has to do something about it, no? US did absolutely grievous damage to North Korea and North Vietnam because they had a superpower size hammer to maim some tiny little guy with.
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Oct 7, 2018 13:55
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aphid_licker posted:It sorta comes down to how many resources you can throw at bombers vs how much industry total the enemy has to do something about it, no? US did absolutely grievous damage to North Korea and North Vietnam because they had a superpower size hammer to maim some tiny little guy with. And didn't win either of those wars by doing so, mind you.
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Oct 7, 2018 14:04
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Chillbro Baggins posted:Quite true, but then they made better bombers and the cycle started over. "The bomber always gets through" lasted well into the Cold War until modern surface-to-air missiles came into play -- the giant, lumbering B-36 could out-turn any fighter sent after it at the time, because at 60,000 feet the air's so thin that the little hotrod fighters' control surfaces couldn't do poo poo. The B-36's rudder and ailerons were the size of a fighter's wings, and it turned just fine. This is largely apocryphal -- the only variants that could fly at that altitude were an unloaded "featherweight" and the RB-36, and even then, there was only a couple of months time between the introduction of those variants and the introduction of the second generation of interceptors that had no trouble at that altitude.
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Oct 7, 2018 14:07
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