bewbies posted:

I love colorized old photos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YibvXiQ64Ss

here's a bunch of colorized old photos from the WWII era that are neat

FrangibleCover posted:

That blog post certainly has an agenda, doesn't it?

Unfortunately I'm going to cast doubt on the Atlantic Conveyor story using another, cooler story. Quartermasters are not allowed to lose things. It is their job to know where things are. Sometimes quartermasters lose things and have to come up with a story of where they are so that the things they lose don't include their leave.

Enter Atlantic Conveyor, which was loaded with such haste that nobody actually ever had a full manifest of what she went south with. She was still almost full when she went down and nobody is loving about on the bottom of the South Atlantic doing a stocktake. As a result just about every piece of British Army equipment that went missing between 1975-85 was noted down as lost on the Atlantic Conveyor, which was presumably at about ten times her rated displacement when she was hit. I would not be surprised if the stock of Soyer Stoves was slowly attrited from negligence, wastage, poorly driven armoured vehicles, theft, loss and bored squaddies between about 1946 and 1982 at which point every quartermaster in the Army independently arrived at the wizard wheeze of claiming that their Soyer Stoves were lost to enemy action, with the result that an incautious or credulous historian could well come to the conclusion that Atlantic Conveyor was carrying five Chinooks, a thousand feet of Marston Matting and the rest of the ship was full of Victorian cooking equipment.

zoux posted:

The Flight 19 mystery, solved at last

Argas posted:

It's not really unusual. History is constantly full of times where x would've been practical and would've changed history, but it just didn't happen.

MadDogMike posted:

Couple pages late (sorry, life cutting into my forum browsing time) but to the people talking about callsigns, there's a nice collection of them here if people want some amusing reading. In addition to the aforementioned "something horrifically embarrassing" logic, they will also occasionally take the form of acronyms, which given we're talking about the military seems rather obvious in retrospect really.

Chamale posted:

I disagree. Wars are won by which nation can send the most resources to the battlefield, not by new technology (barring extreme cases like maxim guns vs. spears). Nocking arrows wasn't the biggest limitation on a longbow's rate of fire, it was physical exhaustion, because drawing a longbow required great strength and years of training.

Argas posted:

It's not really unusual. History is constantly full of times where x would've been practical and would've changed history, but it just didn't happen.

zoux posted:

Pilots are already pretty short aren't they

MikeCrotch posted:

My suspicion in a lot of these cases is that it's incomplete information on the part of the combatants while we have full historical knowledge, and people making boneheaded mistakes due to being dead tired (that one time Stonewall Jackson forgot to issue orders for like 3 days or something)

Argas posted:

I didn't mean just tech. Just counterfactuals that aren't as ridiculous as gay black hitler, just gay hitler.

Nenonen posted:

Not really. In old MiGs there was a height limit, your legs just wouldn't fit into the cockpit or they'd be torn off if you had to eject. But most western planes don't have this limit, of course you still can't be a NBA star nor Peter Dinklage but fighter planes are designed for average sized people. Soviet citizens just were a tad shorter than their western counterparts.

Rodrigo Diaz posted:

Gay Hitler is real https://www.newspapers.com/clip/20018596/obituary_dr_gay_hitler_dentist/

HEY GUNS posted:

this plus "sick" and "hungry" is probably most dumb mistakes

SlothfulCobra posted:

This guy's got an interesting video on a device that improves upon the longbow by giving it a built-in magazine to help fire quicker with less fiddling around nocking, and I wonder what some people in this thread would think about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZuOZ7Fqag8

It's interesting to think of as a mostly feasible invention for the era that just didn't really occur to people. Aside from the laser sight.

MikeCrotch posted:

My suspicion in a lot of these cases is that it's incomplete information on the part of the combatants while we have full historical knowledge, and people making boneheaded mistakes due to being dead tired (that one time Stonewall Jackson forgot to issue orders for like 3 days or something)

Cessna posted:

Over in the MilHist Discord the subject of impractical German WWII gas mask cans and canteens came up. I said I’d take a couple of pics, and here they are. Here’s a gas mask cannister and a canteen:



The gas mask can is made of relatively solid steel; it doesn’t feel like a beer can, more like a heavy old-school metal thermos. The body is corrugated, ridged for strength. The lid is hinged and swings open. There’s a complex latch that holds it closed; you have to pull it down and free of a knob, then swing it up to open it. There are two straps – one goes over your shoulder, one has a flat hook that clips to your belt. It hangs behind you and bangs into the rest of your stuff.

On the left side of the cannister is a gas mask cape inside a rubberized cloth envelope. In photos from 1940 you see soldiers with this attached to their chest. After 1942 they were ordered (By order HM 42 # 1130) to attach the cape to the cannister itself by way of an impractical system of straps and loops:



Needless to say most soldiers didn’t do this and instead strapped it to the outside of the can with the typical leather straps (with buckles) that were issued with the tournister (backpack). This wasn’t good, as the straps crushed the envelope and cape and ruined the rubberization that was intended to stop chemical agents from touching the wearer’s skin. I’ve never seen an original gas mask cape that wasn’t damaged by this.

Here’s the bottom of the canteen:



The canteen cover is made of felt. The idea was that if you soak the felt with water it will cool the water in the canteen. That’s nice, but the water will also soak the leather straps that hold the whole thing together and make them rot. This leather strap is a replacement, almost all original leather canteen straps have some sort of damage.



That’s the canteen cup. It’s made of aluminum and painted black. Bare metal field gear is a bad idea; when you move it all bangs together. German field equipment tends to sound like a collection of clanging cans – which is, after all, what it is. The handles are flimsy and often break. You can make out how the leather strap that holds the belt hook also goes under the cap and holds the screw-cap on. That’s a lot of leather to sew.

Here’s the inside of the lid of the gas mask cannister.



There’s a little hinged compartment to hold spare lenses:



There is a (forged) dated receipt inside. The waxed bag under the wire holds the spare lenses.

The bottom of the can has yet another wire thingie, this one used to retain the special lens-wiping cloth. Yes, they made special lens-wiping cloths:



Here’s the gas mask itself, wadded up to fit inside the cannister. Inside that is a (reproduction) pack of period appropriate cigarettes and wooden matches. Soldiers would use the cannister to carry their cigarettes because it was waterproof.

As is typical for German WWII equipment, this is bad. It’s ridiculously over complicated, with unnecessary hinges, wires, and welds. The metal is bent and folded by relatively complex sheet metal work for no good reason. It’s a waste of resources– other armies of WWII that even bothered with gas masks carried them in cloth bags. It’s badly thought out – bare metal bangs into other bare metal like a gong, and noise is the last thing you want if you’re sneaking around in combat (bags don’t clang into each other). And, of course, they made millions of them.

Any questions?

I’m heading out of town for the Holidays, but if anyone is interested in more break-downs of German equipment/crap like this, let me know after the 1st and I’d be happy to take photos.

Uncle Enzo posted:

The image of the gas mask isn't loading.

Cessna posted:

And for those of you interested in visual codes/cues in media:

Jobbo_Fett posted:

They literally use MG-34s,

Jobbo_Fett posted:

They literally use MG-34s, and the rebels use Stens/Lanhesters!

Davin Valkri posted:

They also use Sterlings, though

Cessna posted:

Jobbo_Fett posted:

They literally use MG-34s, and the rebels use Stens/Lanhesters!

Polyakov posted:

The main rebel blaster rifle we see is based off the STG-44, the stomtroopers E-11 carbine is the one based off the Sten most recogniseably (though the pistols the rebels use are also based off it i believe)

aphid_licker posted:

We never fixed this for the pretending to have an army tier troops. I'm sure that a KSK Nazi in the Afgan has the highest speed and lowest drag of gear but one of my main memories from my time in was a-clonking across the Truppenübungsplatz like a herd of cows wearing those bells around their necks.

HEY GUNS posted:

were you told, at any time, how to deal with this? or was it just expected that you guys would make a lot of noise because that's a sacrifice that has to be made for the canteen to look good

aphid_licker posted:

some otherwise unemployable guy does his best gunnery sergeant Hartman impression at you.

Cessna posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8AHC0DwFME

aphid_licker posted:

I was a draftee in a non-combat branch of the year 2000 Bundeswehr, my wild guess is that nobody realized that it could be a problem because it was essentially a cargo cult army at that point. You dress up in your finest third generation hand-me-down camo gear and some otherwise unemployable guy does his best gunnery sergeant Hartman impression at you. They didn't have enough loving pants for everyone. It was a joke.