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https://i.imgur.com/B5H34vt.gifv A battery of 3-inch M3 guns used with a firing director
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Mar 2, 2019 15:40
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Phanatic posted:Nope, not unless you consider Russian pilots flying NK and NVA planes as direct engagement between their armed forces.
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Mar 2, 2019 15:42
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oystertoadfish posted:I'd love an effort post about that Kuwaiti AA guy who killed half the Iraqi air force, or at least an effort paragraph This is almost entirely based off a briefing that he gave to a class I was a student in...almost 15 years ago, which makes me feel old. I never bothered to verify the accuracy of everything he briefed but I'm fairly certain all of the numbers and the general sequence is correct. If anyone out there wants to do more research on it please do. I'm a little ashamed to admit that I am not 100% sure what the guy's name was either...but I'm about 75% sure it was Fahd (or Fahad), so I'm going to call him Colonel Fahd. Also note I was greatly exaggerated the proportion of the IQAF that they shot down...Iraq had one of the biggest air forces in the world in 1990 and they definitely didn't get half of them. They did do incredibly well though, considering the circumstances. This is a HAWK launcher that I think is the same one Kuwaiti forces were using in the late summer of 1990. Apologies if anyone is triggered by seeing a USMC weapons system.  Colonel Fahd was the commander of the lone Kuwaiti HAWK SAM battalion. While a battalion sounds big and powerful, Colonel Fahd's battalion was...not exactly overwhelming. US/NATO HAWK batteries consisted of two fire platoons (FPs) each with 3 launchers, and 3 missiles on each launcher, for a total of 72 missiles per battalion. Kuwaiti HAWK, however, only manned one FP per battery, and one of the batteries was deactivated. So, instead of the 72 missiles a HAWK battalion normally fielded, Colonel Fahd had a whopping 27 missiles...3 batteries, each with one FP, each FP with 3 launchers, each launcher with 3 missiles. He also did not have much of an integrated defense system, or even centralized command and control...he was going to have to send off each of his batteries to fight autonomously, and let them do Their Very Best with very little help from anyone else. The rest of Kuwait's air defense forces were pretty minimal; they had a handful of Strela type short range IR platforms, some SA-7s, and some SPAAGs. In case anyone needs a refresher, this was Iraq's battle plan and execution for their invasion of Kuwait:  Of note, the main Iraqi axis of advance was along highway 80 (the one that runs from Jahra to Safwan). Both sides wanted to stay west of that highway, as most of the Kuwaiti oil fields were just to the east. The Iraqis also air assaulted a large force over the Gulf, directly into Kuwait City. The Kuwaitis didn't have time to plan much...despite knowing the Iraqis were massing on their border, the Kuwaiti Army was still pretty well caught with its pants down. A handful of short range air defense units made it out to the battle line, but other than that, the HAWK units were the only ones anywhere near ready. Colonel Fahd had been anticipating an Iraqi invasion for years, and had developed a pretty solid plan. His superiors wanted him to take a more traditional approach of locating himself with friendly forces in order to better protect them. Colonel Fahd, though, had something else in mind: he knew that the Kuwaiti Army was going to be little more than a speed bump for the Iraqis, and his plan was to try and waste as many Iraqi planes as he possibly could before his country was overrun. Most of the rest of the Kuwaiti Army anticipated the IQAF flying in direct support of ground forces as they rolled south, but Fahd anticipated something different. He knew that most of the short range stuff would deploy along with the ground forces north of Al Jahra, and he knew the Iraqis knew this. He also knew that they'd want nothing to do with any of that...they were still basically on WWII technology when it came to ground attack (daytime, visual targeting, non precision weapons), and the IQAF had suffered heavily from ground fire throughout the Iran-Iraq War. Fahd anticipated them instead flying an end-around, using the Gulf as their main approach, and then hitting the Kuwaiti ground forces along their right flank. He also anticipated them trying to hit Ali Al Salem Air Base and Kuwait Airport by swinging wide around the left. He decided to leave the maneuver guys to their own devices and deploy his FPs to take as big a chunk out of the Iraqis as he could. As it turned out, he was spot-on with his predictions. This was the (grossly simplified) Iraqi scheme of maneuver in the air (I made a power point):  This is how Colonel Fahd deployed his three FPs:  Fahd's plan was pretty simple, and was pretty brilliant. He knew that the Iraqi pilots would be flying at comfortable medium altitude while over the water, not expecting to be shot at until they were over Kuwaiti territory. This meant they were much easier meat for HAWK than if they were flying nap-of-the-earth. Lucky for him, he had a little fighting position just sitting there out in the Gulf: Failaka Island. He put FP1 there, with a PTL (primary target line) facing almost straight north (note: unlike Patriot, HAWK can engage in 360 degrees, but it had a hard time slewing rapidly to deal with fast moving targets at low altitude. So, it is very important to have your launchers oriented on the azimuth you anticipate the enemy will use. Traditional tactics said to face your friendly forces in order to defend them, but by facing north (rather than WNW) the HAWK battery was perfectly positioned to hit anything flying out of southern Iraq towards Kuwait City. Fahd also correctly guessed that the Iraqis would try and suppress the battery with air assault troops, and told his guys to prioritize slow movers. FP2 was placed just south of KWI. This was another kind of ingenious bit: it wasn't there to defend the airport, it was there to ambush IQAF aircraft as they climbed back up to altitude after hitting Kuwaiti ground forces. Fahd again correctly anticipated that the Iraqis would want to get back up to altitude in order to avoid the short range stuff, and assumed that they'd do so flying south over Kuwait City. So, he put FP2 there, also facing north, ready to splash anything that popped up over the downtown area. FP3 was placed near AASAB. This had two purposes: defend Kuwaiti aircraft on the ground there (in the end this was irrelevant as most were destroyed or flew to KSA), and shoot down anything trying the western approach. Once again, Fahd was correct: the IQAF, after eating some missiles over the water, wanted nothing to do with whatever was still on Failaka, and so tried the other direction. FP1 took on at least two elements of Mirages. After taxing these pretty heavily, the Iraqis came after the FP with helicopters. With their 9 missiles, they shot down 7 aircraft, including at least one fully loaded helicopter. FP2 took on the remaining elements of Mirages. With their 9 missiles, they shot down 8 aircraft. FP3 took on a huge flight of MiG-23s. With their 9 missiles, they shot down 8 aircraft. 27 missiles, 23 kills. In the end, of course, it was all academic. Kuwait was done for in a few short hours, and Colonel Fahd had his men destroy their equipment and surrender. It almost went much worse for Iraq: had anyone anticipated the air assault that went over the island, it could have been massacred by short range shooters. Iraq was so pissed off about the effectiveness of the Kuwaiti air defenses that they went scorched earth on Failaka Island, which even today is still largely depopulated. Colonel Fahd ended up being named the first KSA Air Defense Chief, and was vital in getting their air defense forces recognized as a service separate from the air force and army. bewbies fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Mar 2, 2019 |
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Mar 2, 2019 16:18
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That's a pretty impressive write up
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Mar 2, 2019 17:13
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Jobbo_Fett posted:https://i.imgur.com/B5H34vt.gifv E's a witch! BURN HIM
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Mar 2, 2019 17:32
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bewbies thank you for that write up! I had always assumed Kuwait just rolled over during the invasion (not that I would blame them) but it now appears to me they did put up a hell of a fight.
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Mar 2, 2019 17:45
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And yet, with only 27 missiles you couldn't do much to an airforce of over 500 combat aircraft. I guess nobody thought about buying refills for the launchers..? Thanks bewbies!
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Mar 2, 2019 18:10
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I'd be a bit worried about putting up too stiff a defense if I still planned on surrendering afterwards
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Mar 2, 2019 20:15
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Tias posted:posting about posting is in fact bad There was an oath you take on joining the military, I don't know if it's the "oath of war" you are talking about specifically, or that you're supposed to kiss your gun during it, but it goes like this. "I, a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, upon entering the ranks of the Worker and Peasant Red Army, accept this oath and triumphantly swear to be an honest, brave, disciplined, and alert soldier, strictly keep military and government secrets, follow the military manuals and orders of commanders, commissars, and superiors absolutely. I swear to dedicate myself to the study of military arts, safeguard the property of the army and the people, and remain dedicated to the people, the Soviet Motherland, and the Worker and Peasant government until my last breath. On the orders of the Worker and Peasant government, I am always ready to stand in the defense of my Motherland - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and as a warrior of the Worker and Peasant Red Army I swear to protect it courageously, skilfully, and with dignity, with no regard for spilling my own blood, until the achievement of complete victory over the enemy. If I intentionally violate my triumphant oath, may the harsh punishment of Soviet law and the universal hatred of the working class strike me." Upon the abolishment of the commissar ranks in 1940, the text was altered to omit the mention of commissars.
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Mar 2, 2019 20:18
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Finnish military oath 1918 to this day posted:I, (name), promise and affirm before the almighty and all-knowing God (in affirmation: by my honor and by my conscience), that I am a trustworthy and faithful citizen of the realm of Finland.
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Mar 2, 2019 20:45
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Im going to inflict another vomiting forth of words on WW2 and Food on you all. If you want to read this on a website it can be found here: Gears of History. I'd like to apologise for it being a block of text but i cant really think of any pictures i want to include as its talking about really vile Nazis or just unimaginable human suffering for most ot it. I have talked in the past in passing about Nazi agriculture, I did post about the pre-war Nazi Germany agricultural setup and now I would like to talk about Germany and its food supplies during the war. Germany and a lot of its ambitions under Nazism would be characterised by Autarky, or the desire of self-sufficiency. This came in a large part from Hitler’s observation that it was foolish to contest the British Empire for control of the overseas colonies, that particular ship had sailed for the colonial land grab. Germany could not depend on colonies such as Kenya or major food producing areas like the Americas in wartime, it had to look to itself and to a greater land empire in the East to supply its needs. It is worth noting that as global trade expanded the very character of the European diet changed from one of a staple crop centric nature that people had been eating for centuries to a higher reliance on meat and sugar imported from abroad. This was far more pronounced in Britain than it was in Germany. I talked about this previously but in brief there were two competing responses to cheap food from abroad, the first adopted by Britain was one of open markets where the local farmers specialised into high quality goods and a boost in manufacturing enabled them to pay for imported goods. The second typified by Germany being one of protectionism that kept the agrarian sector into a large landed gentry type situation with tenant farms and large estates. During the interwar period there was a furious debate in Germany, one camp saying that Germany should have liberalised its agriculture, avoiding the tariffs implemented by Bismarck and this would have created a more efficient farming sector far more able to meet the countries needs, this was championed by a German agronomist, Friedrich Aereboe. The other alternative was lead by a man called August Skalweit who argued that Germany should become less dependent on the world. Skalweit himself was not an enthusiastic Nazi, joining the Nazis in 1941 under what he described as intense pressure, but his work was seized upon by right wing elements in Germany as a basis for what would become the Nazi food plan. However it would be pushed beyond the idea of self sufficiency to include elements of eugenics, Nazi race theory and also the ability to make war by the Nazis. Nazi agriculture was lead by two fellows called Walther Darre, who was Minister for Food and Agriculture, and Herbert Backe who was in charge initially of a separate subset of Food and Agriculture which I believe was nominally under the SS and created what would become known as the Hunger Plan. It is worth noting that this plan is probably the second or third largest mass murder perpetrated by the Nazis, it’s hard to say precisely how many were killed by this but it is certainly above half a million. Backe would eventually be forced to step down in 1942 when he was pushed out in favour of Darre in an example of the Nazi states duplication of bureaucratic effort and infighting that was created, in essentially creating two ministers for food with only minutely different portfolios it was always going to end with one winning and elbowing out the other. Hunger plan. When Hitler first declared war he was looking for a short one, where he could smash France, achieve his gains in the west, seek peace with Britain then pivot to invade the east. In such a plan there wasn’t really a need for the plan of what would happen in the east and so the plans of Dacke for that received limited attention until the winter of 1940, when it became clear that Britain would not surrender, and that Germany risked being sucked into a repeat of WW1 where it ran out of food. Germanies situation was exacerbated by the fact that it now bore responsibility for the people of the conquered countries, Norway and France were both extremely dependent on the world market for a lot of its food, and particularly for fodder for draft animals without whom the entire economy of those nations would grind to a halt, Britain had instituted a total blockade during which very few ships would slip through. It’s a point that while the German dependence on the draft animal for a lot of their strategic mobility did help reduce the amount of oil they needed, it was almost certainly overshadowed by the need to transport huge quantities of fodder to the front, and their wholesale looting of draft animals would cause the near collapse of several agricultural systems. At this juncture Backe saw his chance, he had been advocating this since 1926 when he first wrote his PhD thesis on agronomy; in brief he argued that due to inferior racial characteristics Soviet control over the east would collapse before long and this would leave a vacuum which would enable the German race to step in and occupy it to create a food base which could be exploited properly for the benefit of the German people. Unsuprisingly he was failed for this thesis on the grounds it was a work of sociology not agronomy, but the ideas would linger for the 14 years until 1940, in that time he would be brought into the Nazi agricultural establishment by Darre and would end up the agricultural head of the 4-year plan. So in the months of December 1940 to February 1941, it is difficult to precisely say when in that period but certainly in that 3 month span. Backe pushed for and successfully got his views on the matter adopted by his boss, and then consequently by Hitler. He presented the invasion of the USSR as the solution to Germanies food worries, with a quick German conquest of the area which would give it a resource base that it could then exploit for the long term war with the UK and (inevitably as he saw it) war with the USA. This tied into some of Hitlers ideas of Lebensraum and the occupation of the Ukraine, not ideas unique to Hitler, it had pervaded German thought for decades to take the Ukraine as a massive breadbasket to feed the nation. What emerged was the Hunger plan, which was to shut down the flow of grain from the Ukraine to the vastly expanding Russian urban centers, the result of which would be that there would emerge an unbelievable hunger, which would cause the urban population of Russia to die out. Backe would envisage the death of 30 million people, which was the rough growth of the Soviet Urban population as calculated by his department, in his mind this group of people had eaten up all the excess grain from the Ukraine that could feed Germany in the period of Russian urban growth. Backe had a vicious streak with explicit reference to the removal of so called “Useless Persons” in reference to the Jews of Poland and the Slavs of the conquered areas, and a warning to his implementers that they should suppress any sympathy as the war is only able to be prosecuted if the entire Wehrmacht is fed from Russia. He envisaged the creation of a racial Blood Wall by resettlement which would protect Europe from corruption of its bloodline by the inferior Slavs. Food was an almost all-pervasive concern for Germany, indeed General Georg Thomas, the chief military consultants on the hunger plan, advocated the taking of the Caucasus, not to fuel Germanies tanks but to ensure that Ukraine’s highly mechanised farming sector could continue uninterrupted. The result of all this manoeuvring was the eventual invasion of Russia in 1941. Germanization of the east. As you may envisage with the Nazi’s well-known penchant for bureaucratic efficiency, the efforts to implement the Germanization of the east were a bit of an organisational shitshow right from the start. The SS had half a million ethnic Germans of suitable racial stock in transit camps which they knew not what to do with. So they were chosen to become agricultural farmers. This started in German occupied West Poland in 1940, the General Government, they deported 17’000 Poles from around 9 million hectares of land in occupied Poland and 180’000 ethnic Germans, mainly from the Galicia area of Czechoslovakia, were settled in the area. However when they arrived they found that the farms lacked machinery, fertilizer and labour, with the German treatment of the locals having resulted in many deaths and population displacement. Also understandably the Poles had not planted food once the deportations started, because they very reasonably thought they wouldn’t be there to harvest it. Therefore this area of agricultural production actually fell in the amount of food it might have contributed to Germany. The German identified solution to this was to double down, after the invasion of the Soviet Union a new plan was formed, where they would create an agricultural region centred around the cities of Zamosc and Lublin, which was a very fertile region of Poland. This was a major SS controlled area where they had significant forced labour and concentration camps. In November of 1941 the SS started to clear the area, eventually nearly 100’000 poles would be displaced or murdered in the area to make room for a more structured and dedicated effort to Germanise the area. However, there would be significant partisan activity, where after the poles were removed but before the Germans could arrive well-armed groups would come and destroy as much as they could before the Germans could take it. The new people shipped in to settle the area were inexperienced with conditions in Eastern Europe and so were unable to effectively till the land as productively as the poles had. Many also fled the countryside to the towns for protection from the Partisans, out of despair at the poor and primitive conditions and aid they received, they were very resentful at having been placed there as second-class citizens and so were in no way motivated to work hard to feed the German Reich. Like most large scale attempts at social engineering exercised throughout history, dropping a whole bunch of people into a completely unfamiliar environment with little to no support is a quick recipe for catastrophe. The SS expected 40’000 volunteers to join the program, however the Nazis own propaganda at presenting the area as primitive and backwards worked against them and they would only get 4’500 volunteers to move. They would move to forcible relocation of troublemaking farmers from Luxembourg, they tried for volunteers in the Low Countries, but only 600 Dutch would volunteer compared to an estimate of 3 million from Hermann Roloff, an official in the governance of those nations. Germany would also call up skilled farmers from its own heartland to provide advice in the establishment of farms in the east, this would deprive the farmers at home of their expertise and did little good in the East due to the difficulties of farming as these people were a frequent target of partisans. During the period that the Germans realistically controlled that area of Eastern Europe, food production cratered, it sucked up a lot of resources fighting partisans and never came close to achieving any of the aims of the Hunger Plan other than killing millions. Indeed, Germany would receive less food from their targeted efforts in the East than they would from France alone in the west. Invasion and the feeding of the Wehrmacht. As touched on in the hunger plan section, the plan as espoused by Backe was that the Wehrmacht was to be fed off the land of Eastern Europe that it would take. The idea was that in taking the Ukraine it would feed the German army, creating a sort of self-feeding army of conquest while also being able to supplement the internal food supply of the nation. There were dissenting voices, those that remembered the Brest-Litovsk treaty giving Germany control of the Ukraine in 1918 did not solve Germanies food supply issues then, why should it solve it now, the replies they received tended to focus around aggressive extermination of the Urban population which would create a bounty of food for the Reich. However the first looting of the Ukraine was far below expectations, the Ukranian harvest was significantly lower, partly due to Soviet scorched earth but also due to the sheer administrative pandemonium that developed. You had the Wehrmacht who have been instructed to live off the land there, the SS moving in and trying to cleanse areas of racial undesirables and institute administrations there alongside the other administrative elements all fighting among each other, along with the logistical disconnect of the rail system between the Soviet Union and Germany which made moving stuff around the continent phenomenally difficult. There was an expectation which was given by the administrators that the Wehrmacht would exercise a degree of restraint, that capture of Soviet food stocks could be controlled and centrally distributed in an orderly manner. However perhaps the predictable occurred when you let loose a bunch of soldiers with very wide-ranging orders to execute political officers and punish any signs of unrest. Looting and atrocities were rampant, food was looted, skilled local farmers killed for what little wealth they had, draft animals were shot for eating leaving farms unable to operate. By the end of July local food stocks were reported as being depleted, a far cry from the ambition of feeding the entire eastern front off the produce of the Ukraine. There was an over three quarters depletion in draft animals through a critical shortage of fodder and slaughter of them for consumption by the Germans. It has been often said that the Ukrainian rural population was welcoming of the Germans and this was true, after all they had gone through the hell of collectivisation under Stalin and while perhaps not wild about the Germans they thought they might dismantle collectivisation and return their land to them. In some areas the Germans offered the peasants far more generous payments than they were used to to collect food which lead to herculean efforts to collect the harvest despite the shortage of equipment and time however this was not the norm, generally the war itself interrupted harvest very significantly. The invasion itself delayed the harvest which meant a lot of the summer harvest was wasted because of an inability to collect it by the time winter set in. There was also more administrative chaos, when the civilian administration in the Ukraine would avoid having to supply food to the army by employing the dodge of offering the Wehrmacht so much grain it couldn’t store it which lead to them refusing it and they then shipped it west to the homeland. Which created unneccesary load on the logistical system as the food would eventually have to be sent back east to feed the army once it had run out of localised food to pillage. At this point when food crises started to occur Backe forbade the shipment of food to the Army, saying it should extract more food from the local area, this was also the point that the massacre of the Jews begun in earnest, this was especially vicious and thorough in urban areas where famine was starting to set in, by killing the Jews in Kiev the Germans there claimed they had alleviated food shortages for the rest of the city. The effect of releasing an unrestrained army upon a civilian agricultural area in order to feed itself is as old as war itself, it has happened so many times throughout history that it is axiomatic. It is difficult to view it in any other light rather than an attempt on the behalf of the authors of the Hunger plan to speed up the mass death in the east by employing the army in acts of what they had to have known would be wanton destruction. The destruction wrought by the Germans was contrary to their goals of long-term economic exploitation of the area, they may have talked breezily about resettlement and Germanisation but in every instance they attempted that it was a disappointing failure for their stated aims of feeding their people or even producing anything of use to them. Urban production collapsed because the people there had to spend all their time searching for food and not producing arms for the Wehrmacht. It was an unmitigated catastrophe for the Germans in every way except the deaths of millions of Eastern Europeans and Russians, which to many of them was the point. As was darkly noted at the time by Major General Hans Leykauf, armaments inspector for the Ukraine, “If we shoot dead the Jews, allow the POW’s to die, kill the urban population by famine and lose the rural population to hunger, the question remains unanswered: Who will produce economic goods” Realities of the Hunger Plan. As the people actively in charge of implementing the plan, where food flows were to be diverted from Urban Centers, the Wehrmacht soon came to realise that the plan they had been given was completely unenforceable. Backe and the SS and Goring seemed to have this idea that the urban population would just sit still and quietly starve to death on German terms. In reality they fled to the countryside, joined the partisans or the rural population in general. The Wehrmacht pushed for a change, with Field Marshal Von Brauchitsch suggesting that the locals be given second priority for food after the Wehrmacht, ahead of sending it to the Reich. It was couched as not being a humanitarian but a practical effort, the German army could not and was not prepared to wall the urban population into the cities to die, which is what it would have taken. As you almost certainly would imagine, this was rejected by Goring, who replied that the Germans must be prepared for “The greatest death rate since the 30 years war.” The army itself chose to quietly ignore it and let food go into the cities from the rural areas, but before long they moved on and the civilian administration moved in who immediately reimplemented the hunger plan, where only those of critical roles were allocated any food, the rest were allocated none. Eventually however they had to bow to reality, and they stipulated that those working for Germany would receive 1200 calories a day, their family 850, children and Jews were to receive 400 calories. This was seldom met, and millions would die. As winter approached cold would raise the death rate to thousands a day. Conditions were especially wretched in the POW camps, an area the Germans could control far more than the Ukrainian countryside, where of the 3.4 million prisoners they held, by early 1942, 2 million were dead from hunger and exposure. Leningrad, another area where the Germans exercised almost undisputed control over the ins and outs would see another one million at least die from deprivation. Leningrad itself was not to be permitted to surrender even had it attempted it, it was to be eliminated entirely, there was an explicit order on the matter to deny any surrender because then the Germans would have to feed it. Scenes like this were repeated across the entirety of the Eastern front. Food production in the rest of Europe. German attituded to food in the rest of Europe would vary wildly depending on where exactly you were looking. Greece got hammered very hard indeed, whereas comparatively Denmark was far better off. Greece was in drastic trouble right from the get go, it took a more mercantile approach to food, where it would grow tobacco and olives and fruits which it would export for cash and then buy grain from America. However, when it fell it was immediately subject to blockade, and the vast majority of all Greek shipping fled which left the islands in the Aegean cut off from the mainland. This was combined with the wholesale looting of the nation for its resources and its partition between the Germans, Italians and Bulgarians. The Greek government was powerless to do much and was able to only provide 200-500 calories a in the period of time between its conquest and the start of 1942. There was a significant quantity of starvation deaths in Greece while what food there was ended up generally diverted to North Africa. It got to such a critical stage that the Allies eventually broke their own blockade and sent food shipments to Greece in a situation that truly had no good answer. Churchill was against it because his view was it was aiding the German war effort whereas particular sympathy for the Greeks was found in America and among the Greek community in Egypt. Ultimately Churchill was correct in that the Axis would use the food sent to fight against the partisans by their control of the food aid. They waged a merciless war of starvation by burning villages and fields in partisan areas while reinforcing their control over urban centres by controlling the food supply. The death rate in Greece in the second world war was around half a million, or 14% of the population having died from starvation. This marked the only area in which the Allies would break their own blockade and I think realistically it was the only choice they could make. Had they done nothing I am without any doubt in thinking the death toll might have been easily twice as high if not more. Belgium was able to weather matters much better than Greece due to several factors, being solely occupied by the Germans it was able to organise itself better without having to contend with the tripartite occupation that Greece had. It was more mechanized and less focused into cash crops in the first place which enabled Belgian farmers to move into feeding the nation itself. They were able to siphon off large amounts of food from the official German agricultural oversight system and spread it onto the black market to feed the nation. It was also able to sell food across the border to Germany on that market for vastly inflated prices which encouraged the Belgians to produce as much as possible. Life in Belgium was not comfortable in terms of food and there was severe deprivation and outbreaks of rickets and tuberculosis became commonplace, but it never suffered the same widescale famine as Greece did. France had a problem in that a huge amount of its agricultural workforce were casualties of war, either killed, wounded or sent to work in forced labour camps in Germany. It lost around 400’000 workers as a result of the war. It would also suffer from a certain degree of German chauvinism, where Goring of all people would accuse the French of stuffing themselves and underworking their land. He would demand a quantity of food equal to around a fifth of all French food production, horrifying the German military commander who very correctly observed that this would lead to ration cuts, food riots and a long term fall in production as the French farmers would simply reduce their production rather than have it requisitioned by the occupiers. He was absolutely spot on but this didn’t do much for the French urban population who would have their ration reduced to around 1000 calories a day by 1944, the only people who survived well were those who had contacts in rural areas. Denmark was more of a special case in that the Germans did not directly interfere as they did in the rest of Western Europe and even in northern Italy once the Italians switched sides. Initially Denmark was able to supply the Germans with a significant quantity of fats and meat, however their severance from world trade meant that eventually they converted a lot of their existing high value farmland to arable farming because they couldn’t feed the herds. Denmark was able to implement its own system of rationing which got sufficient public support that there was very little black marketeering in the nation, the ration in question initially was focused only on meat and fats. This meant that Germany was able to extract a huge quantity of its necessary foods of that type from Denmark. A large amount of this went to Germanies Urban centres, with Denmark alone supplying up to a fifth of all meat in 1944 for the German urban population. Denmark would export more food and more valuable food in the form of fats and meat than France would dispite the disparity in size. I tend to view it as an example of what happened when the Nazis didn’t try to implement their own unique and refreshing brand of administration on a nation and creamed off the profits. In their refraining from plundering and sticking their oar in all over the place the agricultural basis of Denmark was left sound and intact and provided far more food benefit to Germany, especially compared to effort put in, than any other zone of German occupation in the whole war. Food production at home. In a war of mass mobilization, you need to contend with the fact that you are taking all of your best source for agricultural labour, young fit men, and sending them to fight. This labour needs to be replaced somehow. Britain replaced it with female labour via the land army, use of POW’s and greater mechanization, however this was not open to Germany for a number of reasons, not least among which is that it had a high level of female labour force participation in rural areas anyway which gave them a less large pool to draw from, also the whole Nazi perspective on the ideal woman and her role in the German family unit. Germany would supplement its own manpower primarily using forced labour from its newly conquered areas. However this meant that they had to feed them, Germany refused to feed them so their productivity fell dramatically while still increasing the overall food requirements of their nation which caused the whole system to stall once they started to run dry of people who had workable physical strength and were able to be enslaved. There was also the expected intrusion of Nazi ideology in the creation of race laws governing how forced labourers were to be treated on the farms, they were barely paid, banned from fraternising with Germans, using public transport and so on. This lead to many of them starving or being worked to death, however some farmers recognised the folly of this and treated them relatively well. Poles had long been seasonal labourers in Germany and connections such as this lead to them eating with their German supervisory family and receiving enough food to maintain their strength so they might actually be able to perform the work they were given effectively, this was illegal but largely overlooked. It is interesting really to compare the problems that Germany would experience with its rural population to the problems that Stalin faced in the 1930’s. Both agricultural sectors were dominated by small peasant owned farms which were difficult to really control. Stalin would exercise control via forced collectivisation and the creation of the large state-controlled farms so that he could avoid the fate of Tsarist Russia which had its own food supplies cut off by the inability for it to encourage the rural populace to toil for excess food when their own quality of life was stagnating. This enabled the USSR to employ a ruthless level of extraction of food from its own rural areas that enabled it to sustain itself enough to keep fighting at its incredibly high level of mobilisation, stories of life in the collective farms in (and out of wartime) in the USSR are one of pretty vicious misery, instead of having to control millions of peasant small holds the soviet union had large organised units that were easier to direct, still however the USSR agricultural system was riddled with flaws it just found itself able to extract more goods from it than the Germans did. Germany never had this step and so while a lot of rural people had supported the Nazis and their promises of an improved life, this never materialised so their production dropped to a more self-sufficient level, where they produced enough to feed themselves but not too much else, what excess they did have was funnelled into the black market for a profit. This was also characteristic of the response in Rural France and much of occupied western Europe, further frustrating the Nazi efforts to extract food from their conquered lands. Germany had been preparing for being cut off from world markets for quite some time before the war by instituting elements of a command economy, they greatly extended their production of oilseed crops and also boosted the size of the dairy herds in the nations, with an effort to use root crops for fodder grown by the dairy farms themselves rather than use of Grain that was sorely needed for bread production. This did enable the Germans to sustain fat production fairly well considering the conditions they had to deal with at the time. It did run into problems however with the production of pork. In the feeding of pigs, they are fed on similar food to humans, they don’t graze as sheep and cows do, typically they eat potato, or grain. However, the German people also ate a lot of potato and grain. Pork is a large part of the German meat preference, and if there was not enough potato to feed the pigs then there were less pigs, which meant less pork for the Germans which meant they ate more potato leading to less pork and so on in the predictable way. Germany had two notably bad potato harvests owing to climate conditions, in 1940 and 1943, and a bad barley harvest in 1942. This lead to in 1944 a one third reduction in the amount of pigs in Germany and a feed reduction of one half for each pig leading to each pig being at around ten percent smaller than it was previously, for a total reduction in the primary German meat supply of around half, which was combined with an increase in the amount of people they needed to feed due to the aforementioned forced labourers. Owing to allied bombing, heavy call ups, and the need for armaments to take priority lead to a 40% drop in the production of mechanised agricultural equipment over the course of 1941-44, fuel shortages lead to underutilisation of the equipment that they had and a massive drafting of draft animals into the armed forces meant that there was a critical shortage of animals capable of performing agricultural work. There was also a drop in artificial fertiliser production and a complete cessation of imported fertiliser being available. Owing to requirements for munitions production Germany lost nearly two thirds of its nitrate fertilizer production, and it couldn’t resort to phosphate-based fertiliser as they were imported. Nazi Agriculture at home didn’t so much hit a precipice as German agriculture did in the first world war with the Turnip Winter, there was shortage and hunger but not a huge amount of widespread starvation among the German people, (the occupied persons, especially in Eastern Europe is of course another story). But they were fighting rather inefficiently against a dozen different interior and exterior elements that they never really managed to come to grips with. Experience of hunger in war. Your experience of hunger in much of western Europe was depended in a big way on whether you were urban or rural. In Germany, France and Belgium those that were able to sustain themselves best were the rural population because they lived on the land, and subsistence or smallhold farmers could always survive by producing enough for themselves. It was impossible to police so much and while there were token efforts to punish underproduction it was just an impossible task. As a result rural communities were usually fairly well off in food terms in the majority of western Europe compared to their Urban counterparts. It is comparatively very easy to control a ration in an urban center because there are only so many ways food can enter the area and you can supervise those and requisition what you need, and this is largely what the Nazis did and lead to significant hunger in French and Belgian urban centres and the mass famines in places like Greece. The Black market was essentially the only way that people in Urban centres could survive in occupied Europe, and eventually even in Germany itself. Spending on food reached as high as 70% of household income in France and Belgium towards the end of the occupation and this had significant knock on effects that would last after the war in terms of allegations of profiteering and so forth. It also meant that hunger would disproportionately affect the vulnerable even more, those that could not work, the elderly, those with dependents and young children suffered because they could not afford to pay black market prices for food or had to pay for a child who was incapable of bringing in much money to offset the extra mouth. To take us off topic for a moment and look at the USSR, there was widespread rural famine in a way that was not experienced in the west, the Soviet Union in its collectivisation efforts were able to break the power of the rural lobby in a way that the state truly controlled the production and distribution of food. This is in stark contrast to the problem the Nazis ran into everywhere which was forced requisition or purchase of food is met by the people who produce the food simply producing less. Much like many of Stalins policies, it is impossible to overstate its utter immorality and disregard for human life, but it did achieve what it was set out to do. Britain is a whole other really interesting topic I would love to talk about and might at some point but they had a rather different set of issues to deal with, a lot of comparative stuff has come up, but the Ministry of Food in the UK did what I can only describe as a completely stellar job in feeding the British people. It is notable that their administration was effective to the point of never having a widescale black market emerge in the UK at all. This was done via a balance of egalitarianism, in that everyone ate the same thing and there was very little practical more money could get you, which lead to a very high level of public buy in on the matter. There was also a guarantee of supply, in that it was always ensured that if you turned up you would get your share, which meant there were no huge queues and uneven demand spikes because people knew they would always get what they were entitled. There is a whole lot I haven’t covered, but this could go on forever. I may well return to the topic as it has a sort of grim fascination to me. Polyakov fucked around with this message at 02:50 on Mar 4, 2019 |
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Mar 2, 2019 20:51
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Solaris 2.0 posted:bewbies thank you for that write up! I had always assumed Kuwait just rolled over during the invasion (not that I would blame them) but it now appears to me they did put up a hell of a fight. http://overlord-wot.blogspot.com/2014/02/chief-of-battle-part-two.html They did their best but they really were not ready and they didn't have the forces to repel an attack of that magnitude anyway.
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Mar 2, 2019 20:52
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Polyakov posted:Im going to inflict another vomiting forth of words on WW2 and Food on you all. If you want to read this on a website it can be found here: Gears of History. Quoting this so I can find/read it later. Looks good!
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Mar 2, 2019 20:54
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thanks so much for that write-up! sounds like a CMANO scenario come trueThe Lone Badger posted:Has there ever been a case historically where a dam has been deliberately constructed then demolished as a weapon? Not destruction of existing dams, I mean sitting upstream of the enemy city (which is on a river) and building a dam from scratch, then waiting for it to fill and overflow and cause massive devastation? this is interesting to me, but i'm only finding one thing that direct, and it's not a single big-rear end dam. this paper analyzes several war-time flood events in the Low Countries, as well as naturally caused ones. apparently the flooding in the 80 years' war involved "deliberate and large-scale flooding of the polders on the Flemish side of the Western Scheldt. Experts were summoned to Middelburg to explain where the dikes and sluices could be best destroyed in order to guarantee the largest possible area to be flooded". the paper goes on to specify several of these specific points, but it's all about destroying infrastructure that was built to reclaim land. here's a figure illustrating the flooding in that time period  however, "in the course of the 18th century" the Dutch did build a hydraulic system specifically for defense; "an ingenious network of sluices and channels was developed in order to generate flooding within a few days". it was fed by sea water at first, but apparently "special parts in the big sluices" were constructed that let them use fresh water to flood this area. this appears to be referred to in english as the Dutch Water Line: quote:The Dutch Water Line[1][2] (Dutch: Hollandsche Waterlinie, modern spelling: Hollandse Waterlinie) was a series of water-based defences conceived by Maurice of Nassau in the early 17th century, and realised by his half brother Frederick Henry. Combined with natural bodies of water, the Water Line could be used to transform Holland almost into an island. apparently this picture is an example of a sluice gate which could be equipped with flashboards to raise the water level and prepare a manmade flood event. i guess that's a humble example of the kind of construction you asked about :  here's an article that discusses a lot of the above, as well as examples from elsewhere in the world that might fit your bill: quote:Cyrus the Great reputedly took Babylon in a single night in the 6th century, B.C., by diverting an old artificial lake back into the Euphrates, so that his army could come right up to the city walls at night. the draining of the marshes in particular is an example of deliberately reshaping the flow of a river for military purposes. it also mentions that ISIS has used the dams it's taken control of at various points to flood out enemy troops oh yeah, and the USA bombed north korea's dams and everything else in the '50s: quote:Deaths among the civilian population have been estimated at approximately one million people, a number comparable to or greater than the toll from the World War II bombing of Germany (400,000 to 600,000 civilian deaths) and Japan (330,000 to 900,000 civilian deaths). i think we did some of the same to north vietnam - this is a discussion, including nixon-quotes, about bombing dikes. geneva finally got around to making blowing up dams a war crime in 1977, conveniently after the us was done with it i guess now this leads to another military question: what dams/levees might be strategic targets for intentional breaching in the modern era? one thought i've had is lake tahoe. it's dammed at its only outflow, creating the truckee river, which forms the valley I-80 takes to climb up the Sierras and passes through reno. it was intentionally cut shallow so the lake barely flows into the river at all during droughts. if the I-80 corridor ever became a strategic war zone, however, i wonder if some controlled demolitions could release a few decades' worth of inflow in a few days? i don't know what it would flood, but here's a cool picture of reno in the 1997 natural floods. this is ~18,500 cfs, apparently:  I-80 was flooded to poo poo in this case, but not (maybe?) in the actual hills; it was down here by reno that i'm seeing the most info about bad effects the best gauge with flooding impact information i can find in that I-80 valley above reno is at farad: https://www.cnrfc.noaa.gov/graphicalRVF.php?id=FARC1 they don't have a ton of detailed information but googling indicates that the 1950/51 flood, which hit 17,500 cfs, shut down all land transportation between reno and sacramento. it appears that the 1997 flood didn't close the highway at farad (i may be wrong here), and that was 14,900 cfs, so i'm guessing you'd have to make a very large release at tahoe to wash out the highway in the valley. seems like lowland flooding around reno would be the main result also this is tahoe lake dam. it's not exactly an imposing edifice; a lot of careful digging would have to happen to really drain the lake. it might even be worth the money to drill a pipeline through the side of the drat lake, at a much lower elevation, but putting up a cofferdam and making this spot really, really deep could do it ('it' being a shitload of damage downriver and eventually maybe taking out I-80):  edit: now that i'm thinking about it you'd probably rather set off a large amount of avalanches above I-80. it'd be a simpler plan to execute, i'm sure, and if you did enough it'd take a long time to clean up. but flooding the highways around reno does seem doable. anyway i thought that was an interesting question edit: holy poo poo while i was doing that, a couple superior effort posts appeared before me. this is a pretty effortful page itt. i have a lot to read above me edit2: also i found something about historical attempts to use the yellow river militarily. it seems not to have worked: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3472015/ quote:For the sake of resisting the Liao, the Song court attempted three times to artificially block the northern courses and let the river return to the eastern course whose river bed had been raised above surrounding grounds. All attempts failed, and the construction of a levee system was delayed. The Northern Song state was eventually destroyed by Jurchen nomads. In 1128, the Song troops broke the levees of the Yellow River as a last resort to stop the advancing Jurchen army. oystertoadfish fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Mar 2, 2019 |
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Mar 2, 2019 20:58
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Great effortposts from all of you - Nazi's and food was pretty interesting.
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Mar 2, 2019 21:04
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Valentine X and XI Queue: IS-1 (IS-85), IS-2 (object 240), Production of the IS-2, IS-2 modernization projects, GMC M8, First Soviet assault rifles, Stahlhelm in WWI, Stahlhelm in WWII, SU-76 with big guns, Panther trials in the USSR, Western spherical tanks, S35 in German service, SU-152 combat debut, 57 mm gun M1, T-34 applique armour projects, Challenger I, military use of scale models, PzIV Ausf.F-G, Schmeisser's work in the USSR, Kalashnikov's debut works, Kalashnikov-Petrov self-loading carbine, Medium Tank M4A4, Hellcat, Heavy Tank T29, Hotchkiss H 35 and H 39, Experimental Polish tanks of the 1930s, Medium Tank M3 use in the USSR, HMC T82, HMC M37, GMC M41, Archer, T-29-5, Avenger I, FIAT 3000, FIAT L6-40, [M13/40, M14/41, M15/42], Carro Armato P40 and prospective Italian heavy tanks, Grosstraktor, Panzer IV/70, SU-85, KV-85, Tank sleds, Proposed Soviet heavy tank destroyers, IS-2 mod. 1944, Airborne tanks, Soviet WWII pistol and rifle suppressors, SU-100, DS-39 tank machinegun, Flakpanzers on the PzIV chassis Available for request:  Object 237 (IS-1 prototype) T-80 (the light tank) MS-1 production SU-76M (SU-15M) production S-51 SU-76I T-26 with mine detection equipment T-34M/T-44 (1941) ISU-122 NEW  Comet   Jagdpanzer IV Gebirgskanone M 15 Maus development in 1943-44 German anti-tank rifles Czech anti-tank rifles in German service Hotchkiss H 39/Pz.Kpfw.38H(f) in German service Flakpanzer 38(t) 15 cm sFH 13/1 (Sf) Grille series Oerlikon and Solothurn anti-tank rifles     Trials of the LT vz. 35 in the USSR
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Mar 2, 2019 21:15
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FrangibleCover posted:http://overlord-wot.blogspot.com/2014/02/chief-of-battle-part-two.html quote:As the morning wore on the tanks had been engaged for a long time, and now the lack of water began to tell, on both sides. At some of the lulls in the battle soldiers from both sides queued up next to each other to buy water from a local roadside water vendor. Gotta respekt Kuwaiti water vendors, they have the authority to make armed men from opposing armies queu and pay.
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Mar 2, 2019 21:17
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oh yeah, i also found a guy discussing a question i had raised in here once, about the goings-on around KMT china's rebuilding of the yellow river dikes: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/50744/why-were-the-yellow-river-dyke-repairs-delayed his contention, with sources cited, is that the main thing that delayed the construction was natural floods, not communist sabotage. the pre-1938 riverbed apparently less than a decade later already had "800,000 acres of fertile farms worked by a population of 400,000", so the communists basically opposed rebuilding the dikes on behalf of those folks. in addition, the river was once again useful for the KMT in defending against invasion from the north; this time, they wanted to cut communist supply lines by moving the river back north. in the end, the KMT finished the project essentially just in time to turn it over to the people's republic of china, who afaik have maintained the levees as the mandate of heaven demands in the decades since edit: oh, here's more from another source which goes into detail on intentional wartime dike breaching in chinese history: https://agrarianstudies.macmillan.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/colloqpapers/18edgerton.pdf quote:The decision to breach dikes for strategic reasons was not new in and of itself. Mark Elvin, for instance, argues that the very technology necessary for constructing the huge embankments that kept the Yellow River in its place originated in part from the walls that combatants in oystertoadfish fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Mar 2, 2019 |
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Mar 2, 2019 21:22
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At some point I intend to read Micah S. Muscolino's The Ecology of War in China: Henan Province, the Yellow River, and Beyond, 1938-1950. When I'm in a sufficiently geeky mood.quote:Like all socioeconomic systems, militaries have metabolisms. Nature’s
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Mar 2, 2019 21:56
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Thank you, a good post. The Nazis definitely had a thing where they would try to implement plans where they had a two-pronged goal of "killing lots of people" and "accomplishing X" where X is some sort of economic endeavor, but only actually achieve the first one. The V-2 production is very much like that. And just out of curiosity, do you know anything on how the Japanese managed their war economy? I've read only a little about it, but it sounds like the government thought they could literally dictate the prices of things, and thus kept sabotaging its own economy. Also, knowing a little about how Britain, the United States, and Canada managed their wartime economies, I think they benefited hugely by having quite a few competent, able administrators in change of efforts, as well as wide-scale support of the people for these efforts, which clamped down on the black market. Also, I did not know this  Polyakov posted:Greece was in drastic trouble right from the get go, it took a more mercantile approach to food, where it would grow tobacco and olives and fruits which it would export for cash and then buy grain from America. However, when it fell it was immediately subject to blockade, and the vast majority of all Greek shipping fled which left the islands in the Aegean cut off from the mainland. This was combined with the wholesale looting of the nation for its resources and its partition between the Germans, Italians and Bulgarians. The Greek government was powerless to do much and was able to only provide 200-500 calories a in the period of time between its conquest and the start of 1942. There was a significant quantity of starvation deaths in Greece while what food there was ended up generally diverted to North Africa. It got to such a critical stage that the Allies eventually broke their own blockade and sent food shipments to Greece in a situation that truly had no good answer. Churchill was against it because his view was it was aiding the German war effort whereas particular sympathy for the Greeks was found in America and among the Greek community in Egypt. Ultimately Churchill was correct in that the Axis would use the food sent to fight against the partisans by their control of the food aid. They waged a merciless war of starvation by burning villages and fields in partisan areas while reinforcing their control over urban centres by controlling the food supply. The death rate in Greece in the second world war was around half a million, or 14% of the population having died from starvation. Did Poland loose a higher percentage of its people during World War 2? I ask because 14% of your population to starvation is terrible, and I'm surprised this is the first I've heard of it.
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Mar 2, 2019 22:17
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Nebakenezzer posted:
Pre-war Poland had 35 million people, approximately 6 million were dead by the end of the war. So, about 17%.
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Mar 2, 2019 22:37
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fishmech posted:Pre-war Poland had 35 million people, approximately 6 million were dead by the end of the war. So, about 17%. Yeah it's really poorly understood in the anglosphere just how bad WW2 was for civilians. Most people know 6 million Jews died in the holocaust. If you've read a bit more than the 20-30 million soviet dead is probably in your head. If you know about the Eastern theatre then you might mentally tally another 15-20 million. But across Eastern Europe the death toll was horrific and was a national trauma that shapes politics today.
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Mar 2, 2019 22:46
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The Serbs had a really bad, seriously no bueno 20th century
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Mar 2, 2019 23:18
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And beyond deaths and injuries, many cities were razed or lost in border swaps and people ended as homeless refugees.
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Mar 2, 2019 23:18
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Nebakenezzer posted:And just out of curiosity, do you know anything on how the Japanese managed their war economy? I've read only a little about it, but it sounds like the government thought they could literally dictate the prices of things, and thus kept sabotaging its own economy. Poorly  .They had a very similar problem to Germany with their food, in that their agricultural sector was very underdeveloped and based on landlords and tenent farmers, they had the seperate problem that because the Military drew the draft from the industrial factories the factories were critically short on labour, then young men from the countryside went to work in the facories because the pay was much better which lead to a critical mapower shortfall in rural areas where the work was mostly done by women and children, this was on top of the fact that they had created another manpower shortage when they invaded china in 1937 by conscripting large amounts of the rural population to fight there. The soil on Japans home islands, much like the metal and the terrain generally is really poo poo, so when they lost fertiliser imports their agriculture cratered hard. The Japanese citizen was assigned 1200 calories of rice a day that they had to supplement with various other things to meet nutritional goals. They overfocused on producing staple crops, which were rice and sweet potatoes generally and meant that there was insufficient vegetable or fruit crop to provide key vitamins which lead to widespread deficiencies. Meat consumption was a nonexistence, but only the rich in Japan had ever really eaten meat in the first place at that time. The black market was rampant with many factories having to buy food on it in order to feed their workers so they could physically perform their tasks, and this lasted only a short while before the mining and submarine warfare on japans coast paralyzed their logistics. They completely hosed the land they took in the pacific by mismanagement and so caused a breakdown of the foundation of the rice trade in those areas as the japanese military requisitioned everything that could move and the metal and oil extractors requisitioned the rest along with a wide variety of atrocities which killed and alienated people who might have known how to run a food economy. Hence the cycle of the rural farmers underproducing and funneling food onto the black market continued much as it did in Europe. They introduced a rationing system where there were neigbourhood associations who were expected to distribute food among the people that lived there, among other matters. They also ran on the principle of taking the supplies of their enemies after victory, much as the Germans wanted to do in the east, the speed of the allied collapse masked the fact that japanese troops were going into Burma with only 10 days or so food on them and would just capture warehouses full of the stuff as they advanced. This combined with the usual japanese military parochialism meant that they actually banned trade in 1943 between areas of the pacific turning each conquered nation into its own autarkic state which would severely bugger Malaya and Indochina in particular but everywhere else as well, its estimated that nearly 2 million Vietnamese died but we will never know because neither the French or Japanese cared enough to count. Then the Americans came and started sinking every Japanee ship they could find and the whole point rather quickly became moot. The only consistent source of food away from the home islands they could find was in Manchuria and Korea because it was the one place they had a semi functional bureaucracy installed before the war that continued to function. So the short version is they managed their war economy so ineptly they managed to starve themselves and a significant portion of Asia into the bargain due to incompetence in many cases and outrite lack of care in others.
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Mar 2, 2019 23:18
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Polyakov posted:Poorly Good lord. Polyakov posted:This combined with the usual japanese military parochialism meant that they actually banned trade in 1943 between areas of the pacificturning each conquered nation into its own autarkic state which would severely bugger Malaya and Indochina in particular but everywhere else as well I mean, I started by saying "the Imperial Japanese government didn't get economics" but even I'm screaming why would you do this? Also I'm baffled by the nutritional mistakes, I know by the end of the 1920s we had gotten a modern understanding of vitamins which filled in the blank we previously had with nutrition
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Mar 3, 2019 02:45
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Japan was still super hosed after WW2 into the 1950s. I knew a Japanese guy born in '46? '47? who had lifelong hepatitis because the people running the vaccination program in his infancy didn't have the resources to dispose of needles after each use.Nebakenezzer posted:Also I'm baffled by the nutritional mistakes, I know by the end of the 1920s we had gotten a modern understanding of vitamins which filled in the blank we previously had with nutrition How long does it take that kind of knowledge to percolate? Or does it not spread upwards and you have to wait for the old farts who "know better" to die out?
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Mar 3, 2019 03:33
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It took a while after discovering "vitamins" for science to hammer out which of the discovered ones were actually needed (this is part of why they go like vitamin A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12, C, D, E, K - many items in the B group were initially assumed to be interchangeable, turned out they weren't and even after that many of them turned out non vital and got removed, and there were a number of other lettered ones) and once we determined which ones were truly needed we didn't have a good handle on how much for a while. For the most part we don't hammer out the modern vitamin classifications until the 1950s with most of the needed amounts not figured out til about the same time.
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Mar 3, 2019 03:41
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People still are echoing that myth about carrots being good for your eyes, and there's a big thing with people taking vitamin C to ward off flu and colds like they're scurvy. And that's not even getting into fad diets and pseudoscience cures like drinking your own piss or cults shoving enough vitamins into their faces to get a rash. Picking accurate nutrition information out of the mess can be hard even today, and it's even more of a longshot in a fascist state trying to brute force its will into being the real world.
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Mar 3, 2019 04:20
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I mean it was an up hill battle to maybe consider eating a different type of rice to prevent beriberi for the IJN in the late 19th century.
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Mar 3, 2019 04:45
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also the intense repression whichever tsar had to unleash on his people to get them to grow and eat potatoes. let's not even go into the one where they asked them to change how many fingers they used to cross themselves, that was even worse I can't look it up right now but that's my impression, there was a forcible impulse that made potatoes Russian. maybe I'm wrong? I hope not too many people died over potato adoption edit for a thought on the green revolution, Norman borlaug, etc; some 60sish book I found proudly said that one the big achievements in giving Mexico better maize was simply breeding for stalk strength, so you could literally pile more fertilizer on the plant before it broke under the weight I guess. I felt like that was a great anecdote to illustrate the central inequities at the middle of the green revolution oystertoadfish fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Mar 3, 2019 |
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Mar 3, 2019 05:06
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oystertoadfish posted:edit for a thought on the green revolution, Norman borlaug, etc; some 60sish book I found proudly said that one the big achievements in giving Mexico better maize was simply breeding for stalk strength, so you could literally pile more fertilizer on the plant before it broke under the weight I guess. I felt like that was a great anecdote to illustrate the central inequities at the middle of the green revolution It’s not maize. It’s wheat, semi‐dwarf wheat. When growing wild, short wheat would be at a disadvantage, literally overshadowed by its peers, but in a managed field, it’s all upside. If the wheat stalks are shorter, they have less length over which they can flex. This means that a stalk of the same diameter can support much more weight. They plant is putting less resources into growing a tall stalk, so it can put more into producing grain and a thick stalk.
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Mar 3, 2019 05:23
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SeanBeansShako posted:I mean it was an up hill battle to maybe consider eating a different type of rice to prevent beriberi for the IJN in the late 19th century. Actually it was the Japanese Army that clung to the idea that beriberi was an infectious disease until the early 1900s (with terrible consequences for soldiers in the Russo-Japanese War). The IJN had more or less eliminated beriberi among their sailors by introducing a more balanced diet that included protein sources thanks to British-trained medical officer Takaki Kanehiro.
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Mar 3, 2019 05:51
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Green Revolution was great. Everyone against it is a hater or loser and occasionally a Malthusian misanthrope. It's only problem is that private investment tends to favor crops, cultivars, and breeds adapted to conditions in the rich countries, with the result that it tends to reinforce inequality. Borlaug's interventions were so great because they focused laser improving production of the most needy peoples, which is why they were so wildly successful.
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Mar 3, 2019 05:55
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Squalid posted:Green Revolution was great. Everyone against it is a hater or loser and occasionally a Malthusian misanthrope. Aren't we going to run out of top soil in sixty years lol.
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Mar 3, 2019 06:02
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Actually it was the Japanese Army that clung to the idea that beriberi was an infectious disease until the early 1900s (with terrible consequences for soldiers in the Russo-Japanese War). The IJN had more or less eliminated beriberi among their sailors by introducing a more balanced diet that included protein sources thanks to British-trained medical officer Takaki Kanehiro. Dammit screwed by the IJN again.
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Mar 3, 2019 06:12
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SlothfulCobra posted:People still are echoing that myth about carrots being good for your eyes, and there's a big thing with people taking vitamin C to ward off flu and colds like they're scurvy.
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Mar 3, 2019 07:19
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Stairmaster posted:Aren't we going to run out of top soil in sixty years lol. This is not really a problem attributable to the Green Revolution per se, except in so far as it relates to all intensive agriculture generally. Soil loss has been a persistent problem since the dawn of agriculture heavily effected the landscapes of the Mediterranean, Near East, and Loess Plateau since antiquity. While hardly a solved problem, we actually have made a number of innovations in recent decades that have reduced the rate, with the spread of No-till farming practices having a large impact in parts of the United States. It's sort of tangential to the Green Revolution but the spread of modern erosion management and soil conservation can have a dramatic effect on degraded landscapes. We can actually rebuild soils to some extent, though it is a slow and difficult process:  A landscape on the Loess Plateau. This landscape was severely degraded prior to the implementation of large scale conservation practices in the late 1990s, restoration of the landscape has improved agricultural productivity and reduced sediment inputs downstream.
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Mar 3, 2019 07:23
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Loess Edits are getting weird.
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Mar 3, 2019 07:40
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Zereth posted:Wasn't that disinformation giving an alternate explanation for the effects of radar on fighter planes? Yeah the Brits made it up.
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Mar 3, 2019 07:40
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.