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TK-42-1 posted:I think he’s saying Japan must have surely known they were hosed long term? Or that it was definitely a option at least. yeah they definitely knew that at some level! the whole concept was to fight a colonial war across the pacific that would cost the US more to win than it was worth and to give a brief bloody nose to the US that would cause them to decide "hey we don't really care about the Philippines to this extent" the calculus was wrong, but it's the only theoretically viable path to success for japan (other than not doing wars but that wasn't gonna happen at all)
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Oct 11, 2019 15:18
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Would Japan be a pretty good counterpoint to strategic bombing not working?
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Oct 11, 2019 15:19
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https://twitter.com/flagsmashupbot/status/1182657534559162368?s=21 FYROG
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Oct 11, 2019 15:20
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Milo and POTUS posted:Would Japan be a pretty good counterpoint to strategic bombing not working? No, because it doesn’t answer the question of whether strategic bombing works when the airspace is contested, as it was over Nazi Germany. But the other side of that is that every man and every weapon defending the airspace is a man or a weapon that isn’t on the front lines. Even if the bombers couldn’t hit a drat thing, there is value to keeping those resources locked down. Platystemon fucked around with this message at 15:36 on Oct 11, 2019 |
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Oct 11, 2019 15:25
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Taerkar posted:Ehhh... Conquered all of Russia? No, certainly not. I think the fall of Russian ancien regime is a poor point of comparison. As long as the CPSU had any land area to stand on, some rifles and bayonets to defend it with and a loaf of bread to ration to workers and soldiers, there was going to be Soviet Union. Just look at what Leningrad went through.
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Oct 11, 2019 15:31
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Milo and POTUS posted:Would Japan be a pretty good counterpoint to strategic bombing not working? Japan is an excellent example of blockade working.
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Oct 11, 2019 15:41
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:But then I got drunk and now I'm day drunk, I love all you historical moms and dads. Thread title?
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Oct 11, 2019 16:06
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Milo and POTUS posted:Would Japan be a pretty good counterpoint to strategic bombing not working? It depends on the specifics of what your 'strategic bombing doesn't work' argument is.
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Oct 11, 2019 16:24
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Nenonen posted:I think the fall of Russian ancien regime is a poor point of comparison. As long as the CPSU had any land area to stand on, some rifles and bayonets to defend it with and a loaf of bread to ration to workers and soldiers, there was going to be Soviet Union. Just look at what Leningrad went through. They pretty much didn't have the bread though, Germany captured the most important food production areas, which had already been hit hard by collectivization and famine (so national food production was already in a fragile place) and what was left pretty much collapsed under the strain. Lend-Lease was actually massively important in staving off (and only then barely) a nationwide famine in 1942 and 1943.
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Oct 11, 2019 16:37
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On the other side of things, isn't it not often the goal of a belligerent to actually BE an existential threat? Like aside from when the whole slab of land is being conquered in its entirety, generally you want the overall administrative structure of the country you're fighting to remain intact, because if you shatter apart an entire nation, it's hard to arrange a peace treaty that the remants will respect. It's a better defensive strategy, since attackers can just go back where they came from, but if you want to just push up a border, you need somebody left on the other side to agree to the deal.
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Oct 11, 2019 16:54
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zoux posted:
South Macedonia
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Oct 11, 2019 16:59
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With the discussion about Japan heading to war in 1941, I'd recommend Eri Hotta's book Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy. She focuses on the perspective of elite Japanese policymakers. In short, she argues that very few people at the top actually wanted war and that many policymakers, military figures, and cabinet officials knew they were hopelessly outnumbered by the United States' armed forces and that war would be difficult as Japan was already deeply entangled in the war with China. The 'doves' and skeptics about the war did not confront their more aggressive colleagues, and the 'hawks' did not feel they could back down even as the situation got worse and made even more grandiose claims about Japan's capabilities and the possibility of winning.
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Oct 11, 2019 17:05
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SeanBeansShako posted:Wasn't US politics almost as crazy as ours in the present and they had a growing Isolationist gently caress THIS EUROPE WAR 2.0 thing going on at the time? Yes. quote:How much did the Japanese know about the US Navy slowly moving towards Aircraft Carriers? A lot. Both the US and Britain were slowly moving towards mass deployment of carrier divisions like the Japanese did. The fundamental American threat to the Japanese Empire, motivating the Japanese attack, consisted of two points. One, the Philippines. The Philippines were right at the heart of Japan's envisioned empire, and there were serious fears on Japan's part (and serious considerations on America's and the Philippines') that the Americans granting the Philippines independence might be delayed or even completely curtailed in the face of Japan aggressively conquering its desired empire. The Philippines remaining a part of a generally unfriendly power to Japan was a grave strategic threat to the Japanese Empire, current and dreamed of. Two, economics. America was retaliating against Japanese aggression already through trade embargos on the raw resources that were absolutely vital to the Japanese Empire - oil most notably. One of the main goals of Japan's military conquests was to secure for Japan the raw resources like oil, rubber, minerals, and food that the Empire would need to survive independently. One of the great counterfactuals of WW2 is whether a war between Japan and the US would have happened had Japan not attacked, but the bottom line on that is: that was never going to happen with Japan's leadership being the way it was. There were too many grievances, real and imagined, against the US, and the Philippines were too grave a strategic threat to the envisioned empire to not be conquered.
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Oct 11, 2019 17:19
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On the 18th [of July] the war diary of 9th Lancers noted 'for once we had sausages instead of AP shot for breakfast.'
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Oct 11, 2019 17:29
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SlothfulCobra posted:On the other side of things, isn't it not often the goal of a belligerent to actually BE an existential threat? Like aside from when the whole slab of land is being conquered in its entirety, generally you want the overall administrative structure of the country you're fighting to remain intact, because if you shatter apart an entire nation, it's hard to arrange a peace treaty that the remants will respect. This is exactly why the Summer Palace was sacked instead of the Forbidden City, the whole Arrow War was about getting a treaty ratified and the Europeans needed a relatively intact Chinese government to do that.
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Oct 11, 2019 19:15
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The History of Japan podcast has roughly the same view on their leadup to WW2 series. Namely, that most of the leaders of Imperial Japan didn't want a forever war in China and a major war with the US. But they were fundamentally unable to use any diplomatic tools besides "make threats", "demand big concessions without making any concessions", and "make war." And that messed up internal situation ensured they would inevitably bungle their way into war.
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Oct 11, 2019 20:10
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once you follow a path successfully a few times it becomes difficult to conceive of other options
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Oct 11, 2019 20:20
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https://twitter.com/amblin/status/1182679959568994304 Deadline is reporting an 8 episode series with a budget of $200m  Obviously there's going to be tons of CGI but how many airworthy B-17s still exist? I assume available supply isn't a problem for any of the era's fighters.
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Oct 11, 2019 22:01
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zoux posted:Obviously there's going to be tons of CGI but how many airworthy B-17s still exist? I assume available supply isn't a problem for any of the era's fighters. Ten, IIRC.
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Oct 11, 2019 22:16
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Is that what that Mighty Eighth short morphed into? Because I'm probably going to binge watch all of it repeatedly like I do with Band of Brothers
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Oct 11, 2019 22:21
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Don Gato posted:Is that what that Mighty Eighth short morphed into? Because I'm probably going to binge watch all of it repeatedly like I do with Band of Brothers I'm not sure what short you're referring to but this has been in development for years and it is indeed about the 8th AAF. I guess HBO was dragging their feet on it and Apple has been shelling out dough to all kinds of projects to try and get this streaming service off the ground. This show basically ensures I'll be subbing for at least a month.
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Oct 11, 2019 22:23
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zoux posted:I'm not sure what short you're referring to but this has been in development for years and it is indeed about the 8th AAF. I guess HBO was dragging their feet on it and Apple has been shelling out dough to all kinds of projects to try and get this streaming service off the ground. This show basically ensures I'll be subbing for at least a month. It was a teaser HBO put out five years ago. Apparently it's been in development hell for ages.
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Oct 11, 2019 22:37
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I think the key word is "airworthy". A B-17 that crashed a little while back raised questions as to how safe old aircraft actually is to fly. Things go a lot worse when you're in the air and have mechanical issues compared to just trying to make an old tank work. https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2019/10/08/b-17-crash-raises-questions-about-vintage-plane-safety/ Kinda makes me wonder, with all the difficulties involved in just machining simple mechanical parts to keep old vehicles going, how hard is it going to be to to keep newer aircraft working once they become vintage. How hard is it going to be to keep old electronics going, or how impossible will it be to fabricate new parts. Jokes about wanting to preserve the F-35 aside. Which kinda leads into a thing I've been wondering about after learning a bunch about vintage formats, and how hard it would be to actually make a new machine from scratch to read older media if old machines were unavailable. Like what if some kind of critical information was on VHS or Laserdisk or to make things weirder, CED, Tefifon, or magnetic wire, and there weren't spare parts available to use. Or would it even be easier to just brute-force the things somehow to digitize and then decode the data rather than make a machine to read it like it was meant to be.
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Oct 11, 2019 22:42
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Cythereal posted:A lot. Both the US and Britain were slowly moving towards mass deployment of carrier divisions like the Japanese did. This isn't quite right; the British had experimented with multi-carrier tactics in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and generally planned to keep their carriers together in a fleet action. This was used in action early in the war - Ark Royal and Glorious operated together during the Norwegian campaign, for example. However, due to a scarcity of carriers (exacerbated by the early losses of Courageous and Glorious) compared to the amount of tasks that required a carrier, the RN rarely got to concentrate their carriers until 1942-3. The Japanese only really adopted massed carrier groups from late 1940, as the IJN digested and interpreted the lessons of the Sino-Japanese war. This isn't to say that the British had everything right about the use of carriers. The main reason for the British use of massed carriers wasn't to deploy massed carrier strikes, as the IJN planned. Instead, it was a defensive measure, with British carriers operating together in the early war not effectively coordinating their strikes. The RN, in planning its air defence tactics, followed the RAF's assumption that 'the bomber will always get through', that fighters would not be able to locate and catch attacking aircraft before they made their attacks. Guns would have to be used to break up attacks by enemy aircraft. This was most effective when the guns were massed, so the carriers were massed. They were also kept close to the battleships, which could add their firepower to the defence. Such an arrangement also made defence against submarine attack easier. However, it made it harder for the carriers to make frequent manoeuvres to launch aircraft.
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Oct 11, 2019 22:47
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SlothfulCobra posted:Which kinda leads into a thing I've been wondering about after learning a bunch about vintage formats, and how hard it would be to actually make a new machine from scratch to read older media if old machines were unavailable. Like what if some kind of critical information was on VHS or Laserdisk or to make things weirder, CED, Tefifon, or magnetic wire, and there weren't spare parts available to use. Or would it even be easier to just brute-force the things somehow to digitize and then decode the data rather than make a machine to read it like it was meant to be. This is a real problem already. Generally speaking if you can possibly find a reader (i.e. piece of vintage hardware) for the vintage format, you use that reader. Even if the format it reads to isn't something you can easily handle, it'll almost certainly be easier to cope with than reading the media directly. But if you can't find a reader, then read the media directly is what you do, sometimes using microscopes or other high-precision equipment. It tends to be an extremely slow process, so it's only done when the media is (suspected to be) of significant value, historical or otherwise.
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Oct 11, 2019 23:00
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Has an invasion of Czechoslovakia by Nazis Germany in 1938 ever been wargamed out? I've read that the two militaries were of roughly equal size and the Czechoslovakian military in heavily fortified positions seems like they could have easily stopped the Nazis without too much difficulty.
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Oct 11, 2019 23:11
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https://twitter.com/propagandopolis/status/1182784435340611586 How does WWII turn out if Hitler throws all his money into developing the flying giant grasping gasmask monster
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Oct 11, 2019 23:32
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Monocled Falcon posted:Has an invasion of Czechoslovakia by Nazis Germany in 1938 ever been wargamed out?
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Oct 11, 2019 23:46
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zoux posted:https://twitter.com/propagandopolis/status/1182784435340611586 As development started, the SS would demand their own version. The luftwaffe would consider is a flying weapon and demand control over it. The wehr, jealous of being ignored, would, behind the scenes privately suggest that it shouldn't be built and instead all those resources should be devoted to the Ratte. Hitler, exacerbated with the infighting, would command it personally, but because of faulty, over-engineered ankle joints it would trip and fall face first into the channel killing Hitler and ending the war.
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Oct 11, 2019 23:48
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Randomcheese3 posted:This isn't quite right; the British had experimented with multi-carrier tactics in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and generally planned to keep their carriers together in a fleet action. This was used in action early in the war - Ark Royal and Glorious operated together during the Norwegian campaign, for example. However, due to a scarcity of carriers (exacerbated by the early losses of Courageous and Glorious) compared to the amount of tasks that required a carrier, the RN rarely got to concentrate their carriers until 1942-3. The Japanese only really adopted massed carrier groups from late 1940, as the IJN digested and interpreted the lessons of the Sino-Japanese war. It also hurt the RN's use of carriers that their approach to designing carriers severely limited the number of aircraft they could each carry and launch. The Japanese and especially the Americans designed carriers in different ways that allowed them to carry significantly more aircraft at the cost of being more vulnerable to damage.
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Oct 12, 2019 00:01
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SlothfulCobra posted:Which kinda leads into a thing I've been wondering about after learning a bunch about vintage formats, and how hard it would be to actually make a new machine from scratch to read older media if old machines were unavailable. Like what if some kind of critical information was on VHS or Laserdisk or to make things weirder, CED, Tefifon, or magnetic wire, and there weren't spare parts available to use. Or would it even be easier to just brute-force the things somehow to digitize and then decode the data rather than make a machine to read it like it was meant to be. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the medium remains viable longer than every reader, but if it had to be brute‐forced, we have the technology today. This ominous machine is a magnetic field imager:  “It uses a high resolution CMOS camera sensor combined with several polarizing filters to exploit the Faraday Effect. This is when a magnetic field causes light particles to rotate in a certain fixed direction corresponding to the direction of the field.” It can image 3½″ floppy disks like this:  A machine like this could be invaluable in reading degraded magnetic tape that is too fragile to be run around the rollers of a VCR. Modern hard disks are beyond its resolution and you’d need to use magnetic force microscopy. Wikipedia’s image is not very good micrographs of a couple of hard disks. Magnetic wire is, I think, tough enough to be read spool‐to‐spool centuries later. There is no need to build a replica of a machine from the nineteen fifties, just run it at a consistent speed past some pickups hooked to a computer and do the rest in software. Here is an image of a CD an amateur made with metallurgical microscope lens and a DSLR:  LaserDisc would be easier to image but tricker to decode, being an analogue format. Still, the documentation of how it stored data is out there. The really problematic things are when scientists or engineers used bespoke file format that aren’t documented anywhere. It’s little good to have the one and zeroes if we don’t know what they represent. They might as well be written in Linear A.
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Oct 12, 2019 00:12
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Enh, I doubt it would be so hard to figure out the encoding, if you had some idea what is on there.
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Oct 12, 2019 00:15
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Great post Platystemon, this is cool stuff.
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Oct 12, 2019 00:18
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Platystemon posted:Cool stuff You mention magentic wire there which speaks to something I've wondered about : how can we know that certain storage mediums are viable over timescales that are longer than we've had the written word? Is there any kind of limit imposed through physics or chemistry that puts a finite limit on how long something can be stored
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Oct 12, 2019 00:28
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Monocled Falcon posted:Has an invasion of Czechoslovakia by Nazis Germany in 1938 ever been wargamed out? Like by regular people or an actual military entity?
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Oct 12, 2019 00:33
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zoux posted:You mention magentic wire there which speaks to something I've wondered about : how can we know that certain storage mediums are viable over timescales that are longer than we've had the written word? Is there any kind of limit imposed through physics or chemistry that puts a finite limit on how long something can be stored Eventually even poo poo like neutrons and protons are thought to decay (see the "Decayed" section on How to Destroy the Earth), so literally nothing lasts forever. More generally, entropy always increases, entropy destroys information, ergo information cannot last forever. But I assume your question is more like "how do we know how durable something is without waiting for it to break". I think that mostly boils down to a lot of materials science/engineering and will depend on the specifics of the storage medium and how/where it's stored.
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Oct 12, 2019 00:43
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zoux posted:You mention magentic wire there which speaks to something I've wondered about : how can we know that certain storage mediums are viable over timescales that are longer than we've had the written word? Is there any kind of limit imposed through physics or chemistry that puts a finite limit on how long something can be stored Hard disks will become demagnetised over time because the magnetic bits exert torque on each other and eventually they will all pull each other out of alignment. SSDs will have the electrons trapped within them spontaneously jump out of their capacitors. If this didn’t happen first, the dopants in the silicon would diffuse throughout the crystal and cease its operation eventually. This will all happen in a matter of decades. For claims about optical discs lasting for two of centuries, think of it like books. For every Great Codex, there are innumerable copies that have been lost because they weren’t stored in arid and politically stable territory for a thousand years. Some DVDs have already rotted away. Others might get lucky and last quite a long time. They’re all vulnerable to the polymer and adhesive structure breaking apart around them, even if the data layer is gold foil. Writable discs have dye layers that are less stable than gold foil. The Voyager discs are a match for any stone tablet carved by the ancients. They might outlive the Earth itself, but it’s not a practical solution for the common person.  You might find Wikipedia’s page on physical limits of computation interesting. There is no hard longevity limit to storage, but there is a density limit. Every element heavier than iron (element twenty‐six) has an unstable nucleus, though lead at eighty‐two and most of the things in‐between have isotopes so long‐lived they’re never been observed to decay and likely never will. The light elements are vulnerable to proton decay, but that will happen long after the universe is in heat death and there is no energy around to run a player or a mind to appreciate it.
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Oct 12, 2019 01:37
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Monocled Falcon posted:Has an invasion of Czechoslovakia by Nazis Germany in 1938 ever been wargamed out?
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Oct 12, 2019 01:45
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Cythereal posted:Yes. While folks are debating counterfactuals, one I ponder sometimes is if Japan would have had better results in the "make the US give up on fighting" victory plan by just hitting the Philippines and not striking Hawaii. People were talking about how the US treated it like an existential war no matter what the practical actual threat Japan posed, and I wonder how much of that is because they hit a part of the official US that hard. If they had just kept the fighting to US possessions, would they have had a chance to make the US decide "it isn't worth it to fight over a bunch of islands way over there" like they planned if they hadn't made a straight up major attack on the US directly? Admittedly I don't know how not hitting the Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor first would have worked militarily for them, though.
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Oct 12, 2019 03:24
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The Philippines were exactly as much a part of the "official US" as Hawaii was until shortly before the war. You could argue that there was more emotional connection to a territory that the US intended to keep than one that was in the process of seceding, but the legal status was effectively apart from the ongoing secession process. More importantly, Japan needed a decisive military victory to have any chance of breaking the US will to fight. Taking out a large part of the Pacific Fleet was their only chance to do so - either that would do the job itself, or knock the Americans back far enough that a latter battle would prove decisive.
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Oct 12, 2019 03:30
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