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Ataxerxes posted:An article about German and Chinese sword fighting manuals was released for those interested: Uh am I being blond? There's literally nothing in there Chinese sword fighting. I was all set to attack the translation but it doesn't seem to even try.
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Apr 17, 2020 03:30
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You should share the attack even if it turned out to have no target, this is the thread for discussing useless weapons after all!
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Apr 17, 2020 04:26
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Why does it seem like Malta was so vital in the central Mediterranean theater while nearby islands (looking at you pantelleria, a place I just now noticed) seemed so secondary? Even if they didn't have a quality port to speak of wouldn't they have a lot of utility as basing for LBA
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Apr 17, 2020 04:29
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Xiahou Dun posted:So are you gonna share the sea shanty or just leave me with my dick in my hand. Story time. When I worked at Pampanito we were affiliated with the same organization that ran (runs) Hyde Street Pier. They had sailing ships on display, and they had a gift shop that sold all kinds of vaguely nautical stuff. One of the people working there thought it would be a good idea to use a CD from the gift shop to be the museum's hold music. One day the Director of the museum got a talking-to from San Francisco's mayor. He'd been put on hold, and, turns out the sea shanties from the CD were authentically bawdy. Like, very, very graphically describing what they'd do to all of the ladies in town when they hit port, They went to a different CD after that.
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Apr 17, 2020 04:38
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Milo and POTUS posted:Why does it seem like Malta was so vital in the central Mediterranean theater while nearby islands (looking at you pantelleria, a place I just now noticed) seemed so secondary? Even if they didn't have a quality port to speak of wouldn't they have a lot of utility as basing for LBA I think that it's less that Malta was geographically unique from every other potential place to fit a Mediterranean base and more that Malta just happened to be the island that Britain had managed to legally finagle into its dominion through wheeling and dealing. The fact the island had already been built up as a fortress over the last few centuries was just a handy bonus. It's a similar deal with Gibraltar. I think technically British purposes could've been well served with a base at many points along the strait, but Gibraltar was the one they got. I'm not entirely sure why they held onto that instead of Menorca though.
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Apr 17, 2020 06:55
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Xiahou Dun posted:Uh am I being blond? There's literally nothing in there Chinese sword fighting. Ah, I just read the abstract and haven't gotten around to the article proper yet.
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Apr 17, 2020 07:49
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Cessna posted:Story time. I love stories like this, I can imagine the mayor getting their ears full of "Frigging on the Riggin" or "The Ball of Kirriemuir". It's a shame a site called "Squddie Songs" went down ages ago, it was full of British "military" songs like that.
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Apr 17, 2020 07:52
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Cessna posted:Story time. horny on mainsail.
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Apr 17, 2020 08:09
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Cessna posted:Story time. I spent some time in high school being a unpaid intern at Mystic Seaport. It's mostly a tourist trap but the tourist trap supports a massive archive of ships logs from American and English merchant shipping. Stuff like incredibly detailed logs of fish catches. How much, where, average size and so on. Unfortunately I was in a folk/filk music phase so I was drawn to books of shanties and they are very dirty and graphic. Quite a few were in the form of call and response verse. And alot didn't have formal lyrics. Some like A Drop Of Nelson's Blood would get lyrics adapted to see who could come up with the dirtiest lyrics. An example that is only a little bit bawdy but it gives you an idea of where you can go with it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65s9m5sLxWo A lot of shanties are also adaptation of slave work songs.
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Apr 17, 2020 08:34
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Xiahou Dun posted:So are you gonna share the sea shanty or just leave me with my dick in my hand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtgyKLwaDWA it'll be this. Pops up in Tom Brown's Schooldays iirc, for anyone who's a fan of the Flashman series of books.
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Apr 17, 2020 10:43
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Until the internet nerd came into existence there was nothing thirstier than a sailor.
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Apr 17, 2020 11:51
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Seamen seamen everywhere and not a drop to drink
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Apr 17, 2020 12:20
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Xiahou Dun posted:So are you gonna share the sea shanty or just leave me with my dick in my hand. Yeah what feedmegin linked, but I'll link this too since it links to the rest of the album, and that whole album is good if you like a good sea shanty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU0uSul45-g "And may it always prove/ that in fighting and in love/ the British tar forever/ is the dandy-o" Translation: 'ladiessss, we gently caress' When returning to port, it was not uncommon for boats full of whores to pull alongside and the main gun deck to basically turn into a giant orgy. E: It's also astonishing the extent to which everyone wass basically drunk all the time. A RN seaman's rum ration during the Napoleonic Wars was a half pint (8oz) of 57%ABV rum served in two 4 oz rations mixed with water and lime juice. If anyone has any interest in the age of sail (or just wants some good books to read), the Patrick O'Brien Aubrey-Maturin novels are probably the best historical novels ever written and capture the era incredibly well. There is some battle (and I think it may actually be the battle between the Shannon and the Chesapeake) that some naval historian basically says 'for the best account of this battle, read Patrick O'Brien's version in the Aubrey-Maturin series.' There's an excellent, occasionally active thread about them in The Book Barn: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3393240&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1 Kaiser Schnitzel fucked around with this message at 13:08 on Apr 17, 2020 |
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Apr 17, 2020 13:01
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I think my favourite recurring theme of military history is that of professional militaries publicly eschewing prostitution, but privately accepting and working with the reality of it. Like that brothel on Pearl Harbour that had regular check-ins from Navy surgeons because gently caress-it, if you want to keep VD rates down then that's the most practical solution, which then had to end after a newspaper found out and started a moral panic. Or german garrison troops being forbidden from fraternisation with the locals but still getting issued condoms in their rations for... reasons.
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Apr 17, 2020 13:09
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SlothfulCobra posted:I think that it's less that Malta was geographically unique from every other potential place to fit a Mediterranean base and more that Malta just happened to be the island that Britain had managed to legally finagle into its dominion through wheeling and dealing. The fact the island had already been built up as a fortress over the last few centuries was just a handy bonus. Malta does have one geographical feature that other islands around that area, like Pantelleria or Lampedusa, don't have, and that's a large natural harbour. The Grand Harbour and Marsamxett Harbour (on the other side of Valetta) are huge, with plenty of space for mooring ships, as well as for dry-docks and maintenance facilities. This made it a vital base for British submarines and surface forces attacking Italian convoys, as well as for future offensive operations once the North African coast had been secured.
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Apr 17, 2020 13:18
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Cyrano4747 posted: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. Thank you for the detailed info, that is fascinating. I know what the Soviets did to their liberated prisoners was atrocious, but were there any positive examples of POWs being decently treated upon going home? I'm wondering what happened to those millions of French POWs who had been in Germany for around five years.
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Apr 17, 2020 15:30
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Thank you for the detailed info, that is fascinating. I know what the Soviets did to their liberated prisoners was atrocious, but were there any positive examples of POWs being decently treated upon going home? I'm wondering what happened to those millions of French POWs who had been in Germany for around five years. American and British POWs tended to be pretty well received by their countries when they went home. For the most part those guys seem to have been just another vet as far as most people were concerned, albeit one with a unique and possibly more harrowing story than average.
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Apr 17, 2020 15:34
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Yeah, my grandfather was a British POW (in Stalag Luft 3) and I never heard of anyone reproaching him for it. It was just a thing that happened in war. The other grandfather was also captured, but got captured back again too quick to become a real POW, luckily for him.
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Apr 17, 2020 15:47
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Milo and POTUS posted:Why does it seem like Malta was so vital in the central Mediterranean theater while nearby islands (looking at you pantelleria, a place I just now noticed) seemed so secondary? Even if they didn't have a quality port to speak of wouldn't they have a lot of utility as basing for LBA Pantelleria was really important as a forward airbase for Operation Husky and it was a substantial airbase for the Italians with a large garrison. Fundamentally, Malta gets attention because it was the sole position in the central Med with a phenomenal deepwater harbor, port facilities, and airfield. If it fell, that had vast strategic implications for the theater. That is why both sides spent a tremendous amount of effort on Malta. If the British took Pantelleria, it would not affect the overall strategic picture. They thought about it early on, but figured (correctly) that it was not worth the effort. Pantelleria without Malta is untenable, and taking Pantelleria probably reduces your ability to hold Malta. Malta by itself fills all of the British requirements.
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Apr 17, 2020 16:00
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Milo and POTUS posted:Why does it seem like Malta was so vital in the central Mediterranean theater while nearby islands (looking at you pantelleria, a place I just now noticed) seemed so secondary? Even if they didn't have a quality port to speak of wouldn't they have a lot of utility as basing for LBA Malta is just one of those things that were overblown post-war by the Brits, because it was a good story that reinforced the importance of the empire. Most land-based aircraft attacking Italian shipping flew out of North Africa, where the RAF made like 50 airbases in the desert as the frontline moved around. It was relatively simple to transport supplies by rail and truck to those bases. Basing all that aircraft in Malta or elsewhere was less easy. The Central Mediterranean was Italian/German airspace, and it was very dangerous to send supplies there via convoy.
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Apr 17, 2020 16:52
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My understanding is that Malta was at its most important in 1940 and 1941. The period when they didn't have the USN or USAAF to help poo poo on the med and when things were far, far dicier in N. Africa. Malta doing its thing was a pain in the rear end and helped to make supplying the Axis forces in N. Africa a lot more of a hassle during the period when it looked like the DAK might actually manage a push into Egypt and seize the Suez.
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Apr 17, 2020 16:58
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Regarding the Suez Canal (and the Panama Canal) were there ever plans for the Axis to try something similar to the St Nazaire Raid to sacrifice a few obsolete destroyers packed with explosives to give the Allies a longer commute? I don't know as much about Suez, but seems like if Japan had been able to wreck the locks it would have taken years to get those fixed.
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Apr 17, 2020 17:29
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Malta is just one of those things that were overblown post-war by the Brits, because it was a good story that reinforced the importance of the empire. While aircraft from Malta weren't that significant, the surface and submarine forces based there were much more important. The 10th Submarine Flotilla, despite never being larger than 12 boats, accounted for a fifth of all Axis shipping losses in the Mediterranean. The surface forces were somewhat less successful, though, but did destroy a number of convoys. They could not operate effectively from Alexandria or Gibraltar due to the air threat in transit. Both of these were also more significant in 1940-41, when the RAF in North Africa was limited in strength, and the USAAF was not present. Hyrax Attack! posted:Regarding the Suez Canal (and the Panama Canal) were there ever plans for the Axis to try something similar to the St Nazaire Raid to sacrifice a few obsolete destroyers packed with explosives to give the Allies a longer commute? I don't know as much about Suez, but seems like if Japan had been able to wreck the locks it would have taken years to get those fixed. Suez doesn't have locks, so there would be nothing to attack. I'm not aware of any plans to sink blockships in the canal, but there were fairly frequent minelaying sorties by Axis aircraft. These created massive queues of ships; by the end of March 1941, there were some 110 ships waiting at its southern end for the canal to be cleared. These traffic jams were also attacked by aircraft, to some success. Randomcheese3 fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Apr 17, 2020 |
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Apr 17, 2020 17:30
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Gort posted:Yeah, my grandfather was a British POW (in Stalag Luft 3) and I never heard of anyone reproaching him for it. It was just a thing that happened in war. Also, it was understood that airmen going down had real few chances of escaping alive. Armed infantry as part of a formation (whether that formation still existed or not) suffered more reproach, at least on the German side.
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Apr 17, 2020 17:35
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The Axis (in particular, Rommel) found Malta to be enough of a pain in the rear end that they had detailed plans to capture it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Herkules
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Apr 17, 2020 17:37
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Regarding the Suez Canal (and the Panama Canal) were there ever plans for the Axis to try something similar to the St Nazaire Raid to sacrifice a few obsolete destroyers packed with explosives to give the Allies a longer commute? I don't know as much about Suez, but seems like if Japan had been able to wreck the locks it would have taken years to get those fixed. The supply convoys to Egypt went around Africa. Or, they came from India or Australia. There would be no shortening of a commute, but it would create a temporary bottleneck for sure. The Brits had a minor port at Suez itself that could handle some necessities, as well an overland rail route from Basra to Cairo, so they could just clear any blockage for a while. Randomcheese3 posted:While aircraft from Malta weren't that significant, the surface and submarine forces based there were much more important. The 10th Submarine Flotilla, despite never being larger than 12 boats, accounted for a fifth of all Axis shipping losses in the Mediterranean. The surface forces were somewhat less successful, though, but did destroy a number of convoys. They could not operate effectively from Alexandria or Gibraltar due to the air threat in transit. Both of these were also more significant in 1940-41, when the RAF in North Africa was limited in strength, and the USAAF was not present. I'd say that Malta's main contribution to the war in those years was just was severely upsetting the DAK's supply line in November 1941 and allowing Operation Crusader to go beyond relieving Tobruk. Everything else in 1940-1941 wasn't a very close contest. The Brits steamrolled the Italians in 1940 before their naval supply route came into factor. During Sonnenbloome, Rommel overran a British garrison that was outnumbered 5-to-1, but his offensive was undone by his own silly overextension past Tobruk. Slim Jim Pickens fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Apr 17, 2020 |
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Apr 17, 2020 18:33
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Regarding the Suez Canal (and the Panama Canal) were there ever plans for the Axis to try something similar to the St Nazaire Raid to sacrifice a few obsolete destroyers packed with explosives to give the Allies a longer commute? I don't know as much about Suez, but seems like if Japan had been able to wreck the locks it would have taken years to get those fixed. What exactly would happen if the locks on the Panama Canal got destroyed? Having an uninterrupted fluid path between the Atlantic and Pacific would do...something, right, when the tides shifted? Would the water flow erode the surrounding channel until it was much wider or something? Edit: I just looked at the map, let's assume for the sake of this question that the locks at both ends got destroyed or permanently stuck open.
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Apr 17, 2020 18:33
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Kylaer posted:What exactly would happen if the locks on the Panama Canal got destroyed? Having an uninterrupted fluid path between the Atlantic and Pacific would do...something, right, when the tides shifted? Would the water flow erode the surrounding channel until it was much wider or something? Most of Panama is higher elevation than both the Atlantic and the Pacific, if every single lock were destroyed then the water in Lake Gatun would get drained out slowly. If you left this alone for millions of years you might get a channel between the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, as Lake Gatun fills up by rain every summer, leading to constant drainage and erosion.
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Apr 17, 2020 18:43
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Right, as I understand it the locks are so you can flood areas to lift ships over the "hump" and get them from one side to the other. Preventing water from mixing between the two oceans is a side benefit, and I very much doubt the people who built it in the first place cared about that kind of thing.
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Apr 17, 2020 19:07
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Randomcheese3 posted:Malta does have one geographical feature that other islands around that area, like Pantelleria or Lampedusa, don't have, and that's a large natural harbour. The Grand Harbour and Marsamxett Harbour (on the other side of Valetta) are huge, with plenty of space for mooring ships, as well as for dry-docks and maintenance facilities. This made it a vital base for British submarines and surface forces attacking Italian convoys, as well as for future offensive operations once the North African coast had been secured. The harbor and its facilities also make for easy unloading of large loads of incoming supplies. Pantelleria would not have this advantage.
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Apr 17, 2020 19:08
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Solaris 2.0 posted:The Axis (in particular, Rommel) found Malta to be enough of a pain in the rear end that they had detailed plans to capture it. pretty much everyone has a detailed operational plan to do things 1-n in a war, the question is if it gets resourced, and Herukles was never seriously resourced.
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Apr 17, 2020 19:25
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Right, as I understand it the locks are so you can flood areas to lift ships over the "hump" and get them from one side to the other. Preventing water from mixing between the two oceans is a side benefit, and I very much doubt the people who built it in the first place cared about that kind of thing. I don't think the difference in height between Pacific and Atlantic is enough to matter. The water would just gently erode a connected channel for a few million years. If there was an extreme difference in height, you'd get something like the Zanclean flood, which basically created the Strait of Gibraltar through erosion. Scary stuff, but I don't think there's anywhere in the world rn where that could happen.
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Apr 17, 2020 19:56
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I don't think the difference in height between Pacific and Atlantic is enough to matter. The water would just gently erode a connected channel for a few million years. Yeah, sorry, I wasn't clear. The benefit of keeping the waters from mixing is preservation of existing ecologies. If there were a connection between the two oceans at Panama, then species would be able to invade ecologies that they don't normally have access to. I assume this is already a problem for stuff like barnacles that can hitch a lift on boats as they pass through. XKCD did a neat story about a flood like the one you describe, though the story format is kind of weird (it was a long-running sequence where comics were uploaded every 30-60 minutes; Randall Munroe is a monster).
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Apr 17, 2020 20:21
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Yeah, sorry, I wasn't clear. The benefit of keeping the waters from mixing is preservation of existing ecologies. If there were a connection between the two oceans at Panama, then species would be able to invade ecologies that they don't normally have access to. I assume this is already a problem for stuff like barnacles that can hitch a lift on boats as they pass through. Unfortunately basically everything in the ocean can and does hitch rides in the bilgewater of big boats, and invasion is a huge problem on either side of the canal. Although I think it is true that the situation is less bad than around the Suez canal. I'm not sure even with infinite time that geologic forces would eventually cut all the way through Panama down to sea level. The problem is twofold: The first issue is that the course may instead silt up and the water divert away rather than continue in the same place forever, and the second is that Central America remains tectonic and geologically active. It's entirely possible the erosion would be slower than local orogeny, and in fact that has generally been the case in the pliocene, when the isthmus first rose out of the ocean in the first place! Historically speaking there have been several canals built to bridge the waters of the Red Sea with the Mediterranean, and without active human maintenance they always silted up.
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Apr 17, 2020 22:49
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Interesting, thanks all for the information. I was imagining the tides cutting a hell of a channel through there but I didn't realize the lake bed was above sea level.
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Apr 17, 2020 23:01
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So I went down a wikipedia rabbit hole and ended up reading about guerilla activity in the Philippines during Japanese occupation. And then I read this: "[...]a sailing ship armed with 20 mm cannon, fought off Japanese aircraft and actually shot one down, perhaps establishing a record for being the only sailing ship to shoot down an airplane—a Japanese Mitsubishi medium bomber." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Fertig Now I've been trying to sort out the 'perhaps' in there. Was there any other case of a sailing ship shooting down an aircraft? Because if so I want to know about that too. Checking the sources in the footnotes led to finding out the names of two other illustrious boats in their navy - So What and The Bastard. One of which used giant saws from a lumber mill as armour.
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Apr 18, 2020 00:22
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:I don't think the difference in height between Pacific and Atlantic is enough to matter. The water would just gently erode a connected channel for a few million years. Would a connected channel, no-lock Panama canal be safely navigable? According to a 1963 article from The Panama Canal Review the average difference between the Atlantic and Pacific sides is only 9 inches but the tidal range averages 1 foot (maximum 3 feet) on the Atlantic side and 13 feet (maximum 23 feet) on the Pacific, with the Pacific side having a regular two tides per lunar day and the Atlantic side varying from 1-2 per lunar day. Searching the internet there are a whole lot of  nerds saying the locks are only required to get ships over the hump and that sea level is sea level but that really does not seem to be the case.
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Apr 18, 2020 02:56
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Hyrax Attack! posted:Regarding the Suez Canal (and the Panama Canal) were there ever plans for the Axis to try something similar to the St Nazaire Raid to sacrifice a few obsolete destroyers packed with explosives to give the Allies a longer commute? I don't know as much about Suez, but seems like if Japan had been able to wreck the locks it would have taken years to get those fixed. Yes, the IJN had a plan to attack Panama Canal. It was ambitious and well planned, but came way too late in the war to make any sense. Instead of few obsolete destroyers, IJN built underwater aircraft carriers for this mission. After extensive training for their bomber pilots on the fine details of canal bombing, IJN just decided to change the plan and make it a kamikaze attack. Japanese calculated that by wrecking the locks, it would take six months to get those fixed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400-class_submarine#Panama_Canal_strike https://www.historynet.com/japans-panama-canal-buster.htm
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Apr 18, 2020 07:07
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Pyle posted:Yes, the IJN had a plan to attack Panama Canal. It was ambitious and well planned, but came way too late in the war to make any sense. Late War IJN.txt
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Apr 18, 2020 07:36
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Where was pre LL Britain getting their food? Or even post LL. Canada? India? I know a lot of Canadians served (wiki says 1 million which seems a staggering percentage), but I imagine their materiel contributions were more food based than industrial?Slim Jim Pickens posted:Malta is just one of those things that were overblown post-war by the Brits, because it was a good story that reinforced the importance of the empire. The battle of malta is my favorite of the war I'll have you know 
Milo and POTUS fucked around with this message at 10:11 on Apr 18, 2020 |
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Apr 18, 2020 10:09
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