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BalloonFish posted:The RN does a lot of this weird mix of foolhardly innovation immediately followed by cringing timidity with regard to technology in the 19th century (see also, being a very early adopter of steam engines for capital ships but then suffering a string of boiler explosions and other accidents which led to sticking with the old-fashioned, flawed but now-familiar box boiler, running on pressures of only a few tens of psi until well into the 1870s, when merchant ships were already regularly running at 80psi and some were pushing towards 100psi. I feel like you see a lot of patterns like that in military history, and I wonder if anyone has run the data comparing policy changes with the generational cycling of leadership. There is that old saying that scientific progress happens one coffin at a time. There's definitely a feeling of big wars involving the next generation not knowing how terrible wars are and making mistakes that the previous generation made and learned from, but I don't know if that'd be supported by any real data.
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Apr 15, 2020 07:27
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FrangibleCover posted:Incidental note, ISIS bailed out an Iraqi Abrams with a manually guided Malyutka ATGM from the 1960s to the front. Just because you can't penetrate it doesn't mean you won't remove the tank. All the more impressive when you consider that Malayutkas do not want to go on target.
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Apr 15, 2020 08:31
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Milo and POTUS posted:Not milhist though I think it was mentioned here before but wasn't there this old hand gesture that nobody does anymore? I think it might have been associated with some british public schools I think hegel mentioned it at some point
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Apr 15, 2020 09:01
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Murgos posted:There is a good anecdote in 'Six Frigates" about scouring the Southern Live Oak trees in the swamps of Florida and Georgia for trees that had grown at just the right angles to provide 'prefect knees' for fitting out the framing of USS Constitution. Southern Live oak is very dense and very strong and is certainly part of why USS Constitution seemed to be able to shrug off hits. Scrub tier, the Danish monarchy still owns an entire forest in the unavoidable event we need to raise a new fleet of lineships!
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Apr 15, 2020 09:55
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Milo and POTUS posted:Not milhist though I think it was mentioned here before but wasn't there this old hand gesture that nobody does anymore? I think it might have been associated with some british public schools The renaissance elbow maybe? http://www.robertfulford.com/Gesture.html quote:Spicer explained that, in the Renaissance, artists began painting men with "arms akimbo" -- hands on hips, elbows bent outward. It began in Italy, like so much else, and spread north between 1500 and 1650. It became part of the body language of self-possession and a newly developing form of individualism, the prerogative of princes and other grandees. It signalled boldness or control. When artists in the Netherlands began to use it, they produced what Spicer calls, in another admirable phrase, "an explosion of male elbows."
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Apr 15, 2020 10:40
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That's it, thank you
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Apr 15, 2020 11:56
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Murgos posted:There is a good anecdote in 'Six Frigates" about scouring the Southern Live Oak trees in the swamps of Florida and Georgia for trees that had grown at just the right angles to provide 'prefect knees' for fitting out the framing of USS Constitution. Southern Live oak is very dense and very strong and is certainly part of why USS Constitution seemed to be able to shrug off hits. I did some reading on this because it sounds like bullshit, but apparently there are some types of oak that retain a high moisture content and behave somewhat like shooting into water. High velocity projectiles will just tear themselves apart instead of penetrating as deep as you'd expect, slower projectiles penetrate deeper instead.
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Apr 15, 2020 16:41
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An explosion of male elbows makes me think a new porn streaming site review review now.
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Apr 15, 2020 17:44
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Cessna posted:I would think that a shaped charge would have a much higher chance of doing damage - disabling a part of a tank - than a non-shaped charge whose force is not directed into the tank. This is certainly true if the warhead actually hits a softer component. If it is just splashing up against armor, more boom is better. They actually model this (that is: second- and third-order effects/damage from armor effectively resisting penetration) pretty extensively in developing protection schemes. It is pretty much always assumed any components eating a direct hit from a penetrator or HEAT round are toast no matter what you do, but you CAN effectively harden certain things to resist overpressure resulting from a near-miss or nearby explosion. All this originally stemmed from the desperate early efforts in OIF to better harden vehicles against IEDs built from old artillery rounds, but it was also found to add a lot of resistance to close-by HEAT detonations. It is sort of like how battleship armor went to the "all-or-nothing" scheme, but in reverse. Of course the big tradeoff for this is WEIGHT, which is now a lol problem for the Abrams in particular. quote:I wish I shared your faith in them. Similar claims are made every few years and have been for a very long time. It is funny you say this -- I'm sure it is very true, and it is a little ironic that I'm here extolling the virtues of tank armor when I've kind of developed a reputation as a dedicated tank-hater in my professional life. To be clear, I think that we all recognize the vulnerability of tanks to a variety of different things. My main point here was just to highlight that modern LOS protection schemes -- especially to the front -- are really quite good, and generally overmatch older LOS missiles. A whole lot of good that does you, though, when your opponent fires something more sophisticated that daggers through the top of your turret, or worse yet, blankets the air above you with a few hundred smart penetrator submunitions. A buddy of mine is very fond of saying that tanks should now basically be half-spheres, like a turtle or something. quote:Out of curiosity, what is your experience with armor? Just wondering. I wasn't ever a crewman or anything; I'm an intel nerd. I got....way more exposure than I ever wanted to threat modeling and armor development when I worked for what is now Futures Command.
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Apr 15, 2020 20:28
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Murgos posted:Fun Fact #2 even though the the USS Constitution was rated as a 44 gun ship she usually carried more than 50 guns. In fact the number of guns a ship was rated for was often pretty far off what she would carry. HMS Shannon and USS Chesapeake, even though both rated as 38 gun frigates were carrying 48 and 49 guns, respectively, at the time of their battle. The rating of a wooden warship usually only covered her main broadside armament. Chasers, carronades, and swivel guns were not included. It was also usually an "as built" thing, and many navies eventually decided the builders were too pessimistic.
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Apr 15, 2020 20:36
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Murgos posted:There is a good anecdote in 'Six Frigates" about scouring the Southern Live Oak trees in the swamps of Florida and Georgia for trees that had grown at just the right angles to provide 'prefect knees' for fitting out the framing of USS Constitution. Southern Live oak is very dense and very strong and is certainly part of why USS Constitution seemed to be able to shrug off hits. The Chesapeake and Shannon were remarkably even matches, and it’s a testament to Captain Broke and his crew that they so quickly and handily beat the Chesapeake. It’s was a pretty famous victory (and inspired a great sea shanty/ballad), especially since at the time the RN was having a very rough time of it.
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Apr 15, 2020 20:54
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Pryor on Fire posted:I did some reading on this because it sounds like bullshit, but apparently there are some types of oak that retain a high moisture content and behave somewhat like shooting into water. High velocity projectiles will just tear themselves apart instead of penetrating as deep as you'd expect, slower projectiles penetrate deeper instead.
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Apr 15, 2020 21:04
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SeanBeansShako posted:An explosion of male elbows makes me think a new porn streaming site review review now. Because of the well-known phenomenon of quantum fetish dynamics, three sites already exist, as well as a discord with around 20 members dedicated to male elbow multiplication
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Apr 15, 2020 21:33
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:
I'm just going to drop an anecdote here: My grandparents lived in the Hampshire village home to The Chesapeake Mill built in 1820 from the timbers of the Chesapeake. The parts of the ship were used without alteration, so the mill's main dimensions are the same as the frigate's deck, and each set of joists, pillars and floors are rebuilt sections of American frigate. The stairways are also reused ship ladders, although (AFAIK) it can't be confirmed that they are from the Chesapeake and not another ship. As a 10-year old who was already obsessed with industrial archaeology and urbexing (and ships), I was allowed into the mill after it had stood intact but unused for about a decade but long before it was restored and repurposed. All the machinery was still there. Even at that age it was really weird and evocative to be treading on creaking, shifting planks of Georgia oak and Virginia pine which still bear what could be splinter and cutlass marks (or are just carpentry marks or wear and tear from 150 years of industrial use...but I know which sounds better) and to look up and see what is very obviously the deckhead of a sailing ship.
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Apr 15, 2020 21:46
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BalloonFish posted:I'm just going to drop an anecdote here: My grandparents lived in the Hampshire village home to The Chesapeake Mill built in 1820 from the timbers of the Chesapeake. The parts of the ship were used without alteration, so the mill's main dimensions are the same as the frigate's deck, and each set of joists, pillars and floors are rebuilt sections of American frigate. The stairways are also reused ship ladders, although (AFAIK) it can't be confirmed that they are from the Chesapeake and not another ship. this is like something out of Fallout: Wickam Parish
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Apr 15, 2020 21:52
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Please tell me they turned it into a brewery or something like that
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Apr 15, 2020 23:48
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Are there any good books on the thirty years war with more modern scholarship than Wedgewood
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Apr 16, 2020 00:05
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Silver John posted:Are there any good books on the thirty years war with more modern scholarship than Wedgewood
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Apr 16, 2020 00:12
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Osprey has their week 4 free books up. I already checked and they work. This week: Jagdgeschwader 52 M1 Abrams vs T-72 Ural Japan 1945 Viking Warrior vs Anglo-Saxon Warrior Bill Slim
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Apr 16, 2020 00:52
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gently caress yeah Slim
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Apr 16, 2020 01:20
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Silver John posted:Are there any good books on the thirty years war with more modern scholarship than Wedgewood There's a new book by Herfried Münkler, released 2017. It hasn't been translated yet, so you need good German if you want to read it. It's also really dense. I'm on page 147 (out of 975) and the war has just started. All that politicking going on and the smaller conflicts leading up to the 30 Years War were fun to read about, though.
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Apr 16, 2020 11:36
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An article about German and Chinese sword fighting manuals was released for those interested: https://mas.cardiffuniversitypress.org/articles/abstract/10.18573/mas.101/
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Apr 16, 2020 13:02
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TK-42-1 posted:Please tell me they turned it into a brewery or something like that In the 2000s the mill was restored (very well, not that there was any other way to do it given how many heritage listings and preservation orders are on it) and turned into a high-end antiques shop which had lovely but very expensive stuff. That obviously didn't do so well because last time I swung through there it had become a less high end antique/bric-a-brac shop with a cafe attached. The building is still in lovely condition.
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Apr 16, 2020 13:16
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Was reading about Operation Kiebitz, the failed German plot in 1943 to have four U-Boat commanders escape from a prison camp in Ontario. Were there any Axis prisoners held in North America that successfully escaped and returned to service before the war ended? Or even any held in the British Isles that got away?
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Apr 16, 2020 16:04
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There was at least one Luftwaffe pilot who got shot down over Britain, was send to Canada as a POW, escaped and then made his way back via the (neutral) U.S. E; his name was Franz von Werra. They made a movie about the story in 1957; 'The one that got away'. Wikipedia article. Molentik fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Apr 16, 2020 |
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Apr 16, 2020 16:26
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Was reading about Operation Kiebitz, the failed German plot in 1943 to have four U-Boat commanders escape from a prison camp in Ontario. There were a few interesting ones that managed to evade capture. Wikipedi has a list of some of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prisoner-of-war_escapes#Axis Notable ones: There were some German and austrian climbers who got interred in India in 1939 after doing some poo poo in the Himalayas and getting caught out by the war. They eventually escaped, one of them hung out with the Dali Lama until he fled from in front of the Communist Chinese in the 50s, and the others managed to make their way east to Japanese front lines and waited out the war in Japan. One Luftwaffe guy (Von Werra) escaped a bunch in England and got shipped to Canada for his trouble. In Canada he managed to escape, made his way to the then-neutral US. There he turned himself over to the authorities who charged him with illegal immigration, got bailed out by the German consulate, who then helped get him to Mexico. From there he went to S. America, from there to Spain, and from there to Germany. Only POW to escape and get back to Germany during the war. He was killed in a training accident in 1941. There are at least two examples where dudes escaped in N. America and managed to blend in (usually after having been presumed drowned or otherwise killed in the escape), up to and including marrying people. One turned himself in in the early 50s and was at the time married to a female USN officer. He ended up getting naturalized and living in the US. Then you've got Georg Gaertner. Dude escaped after the war ended. He was afraid of being repatriated to the Soviet Zone, where his hometown was, so jumped a fence and ran. He spoke good english and managed to make a fake ID and get a social security card using it and just blended in. Married a woman in the 60s. It's not like they weren't looking for him - he was on the FBI's top wanted list for decades. Eventually lived in Colorado for a while, moved to Hawaii as an old man. His wife got freaked out by his refusal to talk about his past in the 80s and threatened to leave him when he flat out refused to tell her why he couldn't travel internationally, which culminated in him telling her about being an escaped German POW. She convinced him to come clean, he contacts a history professor who specialized in German POWs, and in the end he got an attorney and surrendered to authorities. . . . at which point no one knew what to do with him. He wasn't an illegal immigrant as he'd been brought to the US against his will. There was a debate over whether he was even really a POW when he escaped, as the war was over. The FBI just took one look at him and said they had no interest in him any more, and in the end he was naturalized as a US citizen. In 2009. It took something like 15 years for them to figure out what the blue gently caress to do with him.
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Apr 16, 2020 16:30
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Was reading about Operation Kiebitz, the failed German plot in 1943 to have four U-Boat commanders escape from a prison camp in Ontario. Franz Werra was the only one to escape from an Allied camp - he made several unsuccessful attempts to break out of camps in Britain, then was shipped to Canada and managed to escape off a train into the then-neutral USA.
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Apr 16, 2020 16:31
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Cyrano4747 posted:PROBATION 04/13/20 05:12pm Cyrano4747 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braxton_Bragg posted:Bragg had a reputation for being a strict disciplinarian and one who adhered to regulations literally. There is a famous, apocryphal story, included in Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs, about Bragg as a company commander at a frontier post where he also served as quartermaster. He submitted a requisition for supplies for his company, then as quartermaster declined to fill it. As company commander, he resubmitted the requisition, giving additional reasons for his requirements, but as the quartermaster he denied the request again. Realizing that he was at a personal impasse, he referred the matter to the post commandant, who exclaimed, "My God, Mr. Bragg, you have quarreled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarreling with yourself!"
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Apr 16, 2020 18:50
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Cyrano4747 posted:There were a few interesting ones that managed to evade capture. Wikipedi has a list of some of them: That's fascinating, I'd never heard of Gaertner. Sounds like he made the right call not going back to an area under Soviet control. How did that work for the other hundreds of thousands of German prisoners repatriated? Were they turned loose at the German border and expected to figure it out, or were they required to return to their home town even if it was under Soviet control?
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Apr 16, 2020 21:39
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Hyrax Attack! posted:That's fascinating, I'd never heard of Gaertner. Sounds like he made the right call not going back to an area under Soviet control. This depends a LOT on the time. Remember: soldiers were being repatriated right up through I think 1955. Something like that is when the Soviets let go of their final batch of POWs (at least the ones they admitted to - the guys who came back said that others were still out there). I don't know the specifics of where they were turned loose, but the thing that kind of makes his worry a bit of a non-issue is that the Soviet Zone wasn't sealed off from the western zones until 1950. Between 1945 and 1950 you see about 15 million people move from Eastern Europe in general to the west, usually because they didn't care for the Soviets. We're talking Poles, Czechs, Germans, Romanians, all of them. I don't have the numbers for Germany off the top of my head, but it was significant. Within Germany itself the situation was really more of self-sorting. People who really, really felt strongly one way or the other about the Soviets and communism in general tended to either move into or out of the Soviet Zone. You see a lot of pre-war socialists and communists move into what would become E. Germany, for example, and a bunch of people who really hated that poo poo move into the west. Of course this wasn't all or even most people with political opinions. You have countless examples where someone doesn't want to move away from their family, friends, and hometown and sticks it out under a type of government that they might not prefer. Beginning in about 1950 you start seeing the Soviets crack down on this across Europe. In Germany this is when you see some actual border controls although they were pretty easy to get around initially. On through the 50s you have the border steadily hardening - first you could just walk through the woods and avoid roads, then you have patrols, and eventually you have mine fields, frequent surveillance of common routes, etc. By the time you get to the early 60s the land border was pretty daunting, and the enclave of West Berlin was really the last good place to just walk west and apply for asylum. Closing that up is what prompted the Berlin wall. So even if he had been taken back to his hometown - something that I don't think actually happened with soldiers being repatriated from overseas* - if he'd actually gone home in 1946 he could have just walked wherever the gently caress he wanted after that. Remember, this is a guy who was fed a steady diet of pretty dire propaganda about the Soviet Union for most of his adult life, and the choice he made probably wasn't entirely rational. Not to say that the Soviets didn't do ugly poo poo (see the 17 June 1953 uprising in Berlin, Prague Spring, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution etc), but it wasn't quite as hosed up as mid-war Nazi propaganda would have you believe. *to give one example that I do know a bit about, the POWs that were trickling out of the USSR in the early 50s were basically just put on a train to Berlin and dumped off. The Germans had to organize their own aid system to basically scoop these hosed up POWs off the street so they didn't just become homeless. THere's one picture of one of those guys that I really remember from some book. It's Berlin at least far enough after the war that he's not sitting in a pile of rubble, a woman is walking by in normal civilian clothes, and this dude is wearing literal rags and just standing at this station looking loving bewildered.
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Apr 16, 2020 22:09
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Ah ha. Found it. I kinda misremembered the details but it’s the cover image on a good book on this subject. It’s been years since I read it so I’m sure I’m misremembering big chunks though. 
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Apr 16, 2020 22:23
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Here’s another good one. 
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Apr 16, 2020 22:24
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Now that said you also have organized repatriation camps where they were reaclimated before being put back in the general population. It really depends on when the release happens, what the circumstances were, and where they were going.   You also have a lot of these guys getting anywhere from ignored and left to deal with their issues themselves (the all too common fate of pows everywhere) to actively persecuted as probable fascist war criminals by E German authorities. In fairness some of them were. The war crimes trials of the 60s in W Germany were a thing. Then again, a lot of them weren’t. Reintegrating German pows was a microcosm of the issues surrounding trying to build a post war Germany in general. It’s a super complex issue. gently caress I’ve got two whole shelves of books about that.
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Apr 16, 2020 22:30
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Cyrano4747 posted:Reintegrating German pows was a microcosm of the issues surrounding trying to build a post war Germany in general. It’s a super complex issue. gently caress I’ve got two whole shelves of books about that. Speaking of, if anyone has blue or white fabric, PM me. Making masks.
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Apr 16, 2020 22:46
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Cyrano4747 posted:This depends a LOT on the time. I have heard a story about German POW's taken by Finland during the Lapland War (1944-45) where the Finns as a part of ceasefire agreement had to expel German troops from northern Finland by force. The USSR demanded these prisoners be handed over, and some of them were put into a long freight train but badly guarded. The is a swampy area in northern Finland where the train makes a very long and very slow accent and many of the POW's escaped there and hiked to Sweden, supposedly encouraged by their guards. Also, Estonian volunteers who fought in the Finnish army had to be handed over to the USSR and those who were didn't have a good time about it.
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Apr 16, 2020 22:47
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https://twitter.com/wrkclasshistory/status/1248802646800183304
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Apr 17, 2020 01:38
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That’s mega lovely but it’s a bit disingenuous to say the sentences were under the Nazi penal code. Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code - which made homosexual activity a criminal offense - dated to 1871. The Nazis were far, far more vigorous in prosecuting for it and made the punishments far more severe, but the law itself was pre-Nazi. It should be noted that the concentration camps also had “normal” criminals in them. The Nazis liked using run of the mill rapists, murderers etc as kapos, especially in the camps with more political prisoners. Im guessing those people also had to serve out their sentences and the homosexuals were caught up in the same policy. Again not saying it was just or anything other than wrong and lovely but the law that put those people in those camps pre dated the Nazis by over 50 years.
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Apr 17, 2020 02:04
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I guess it makes sense by classic eugenicist race-science to define normal criminals as genetically flawed and worthy for removal from the gene pool.
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Apr 17, 2020 02:09
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SlothfulCobra posted:I guess it makes sense by classic eugenicist race-science to define normal criminals as genetically flawed and worthy for removal from the gene pool. Buchenwald was a concentration camp, not an extermination camp. Regular criminals were placed there both as a general punishment and to keep an eye on the political prisoners, the "deviants," and the prominent prisoners that were sent there in exchange for privileges. By the time you get into the war the prisoners are mostly being used as forced labor. Buchenwald in particular was used for high profile prisoners that they wanted to keep relatively close to home. This isn't to say it wasn't an awful, brutal place but it's nothing like the actual death camps. The total death toll was about 56,000 people out of the total ~240,000 who passed through it at one time or another, about a 23% mortality rate. Most of the deaths were due to general malnutrition and mistreatment, and the diseases that went along with those.
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Apr 17, 2020 02:20
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:The RN was pretty grumpy about all the bad press they got in the start of the War of 1812 when the Americans frigates kept capturing their frigates. The newspaper reading British public was furious because all they saw was frigate and frigate, not that the Constitution was 1500 tons and nominally 44 guns (most of them 24lbers) vs the Java’s 38 guns (mostly only 18lbers) and 1000 tons. So are you gonna share the sea shanty or just leave me with my dick in my hand.
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Apr 17, 2020 03:26
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