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PeterCat posted:400,000 is what stuck in my head, must have been a total I read a long time ago instead of the number of Germans. The big number is mostly an artifact of big surrenders involving scores of non-combat personnel. A good haul against the always-understaffed Axis but not as big as it sounds. OctaviusBeaver posted:Was pulling the cream of the crop out of the infantry the right call because they could have proportionally greater effect in other areas? It makes sense in theory but infantry take the heaviest casualties so maybe you could reduce that by upping the quality. I don't think anybody has an answer for this. McNamara was drafting guys who were literally mentally disabled, which is a different story from just taking the bottom of the draft class. VanSandman posted:How did you fight at night anyway? Wouldn't the enemy bomber be running without lights? If there's no moon or it's cloudy, do you even have a chance of finding your target well enough to hit them even with radar? At the very end of the strategy, guys in night fighters needed to squint their eyes and try to make out the shapes in the dark. On cloudy moonless nights, it was pretty hard. The Germans had a lot of success with upward-pointing guns, which allowed pilots to pass under and make more use of the bomber's silhouette, or stray light from spotlights. sullat posted:Someone posted an article in a prior thread about it. Some guy had done a bunch of research on the subject. As they said earlier, there was a lot of new ideas, then counters, then counter-counters, up until the US had the bright idea of overwhelming the air defense network with thousand-bomber raids. The Germans were using ground control to vector night fighters to their targets, so the Brits had German speakers get on the same frequency and give them bad directions and generally poo poo up the channel. The Germans (assuming that they were on the bombers) switched to women directors, but the British simply found German speaking women and kept it up. On the whole, I would not say the Brits ever figured out a good system for conducting night bombing raids. The Americans probably had better survival rates in the day time, as escort fighters were available to help and operational losses (due to darkness) lessened. For a while, the British strategy for bombing was to just route bombers through one-by-one, making use of the limits of the German interception system. Basically, only a single bomber could be intercepted at a time, if all bombers flew through a small enough sector of the German radar network. So 1/10 bombers would definitely be lost to interception, while 9/10 were free to wander through. It worked until the Germans tightened up defenses and soon loss rates were like 50%. Miserable stuff, all statistics and death
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Dec 2, 2020 07:25
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Regardless of the WW2 history bit, I think Hasting's core hypothesis is worth examining - he's saying that the US has decided to emphasise using material quality and quantity to fight and win wars over risking blood. Remember this article is from 1985. Up to that point he's right. That was the war strategy of the US and Britain and it's why there are so few high risk operations during the war; the plan was to always fight from a position of overwhelming strength. Arguably there are a few instances in the war where this costs the Allies and a willingness to accept casualties in the short term would have reduced them in the long term. The bit of his argument that's there but not in this particular argument is that this is the cause of US failure to win in Korea and Vietnam - the twin problems of low quality fighting infantry and an unwillingness to accept casualties resulted in an inability to fight the war effectively. Analysis: 1) He correctly identified a problem and the US military had agreed he'd identified a problem. Long before the article was written the US army was doing post-Vietnam soul searching and reorganisation into a high quality professional force. The fruits of that reorganisation were proved in Desert Storm. 2) It's unclear that unwillingness to accept casualties has been the fundamental problem that Hastings claims it was. He doesn't want to delve into the fundamental unwinnableness of Vietnam. To talk modern for a moment, despite casualties US troops are still in Iraq and Afghanistan. The USSR tried Afghanistan with an 'accept mass casualties' mentality and failed. Basically he raises some interesting questions that are worth investigating, but he cherry picks his evidence and is wrong in his asserted conclusions.
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Dec 2, 2020 11:34
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Alchenar posted:Basically he raises some interesting questions that are worth investigating, but he cherry picks his evidence and is wrong in his asserted conclusions. This is basically the historian version of JAQing off.
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Dec 2, 2020 12:01
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Xiahou Dun posted:It's obviously impractical, but if you were some kind of crazy person you could make a system of flags that was basically hexadecimal or something and communicate any arbitrarily complex message. It would just take forever, require really specific visibility and everyone has to be able to read your super complex coding language. I mean, if you're going to do that, a big ol' flashlight and Morse code is probably the way to go
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Dec 2, 2020 12:58
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The US occupation of Iraq/Afghanistan would be unwinnable no matter how many troops got shredded by IEDs or shot in ambushes or doorkicking operations. They could never, ever dimish the legitimacy of their adversaries so long as they continued to occupt Iraq and kill and maim civilians. Like their only option was to immediately dump like 10 times the amount of money on rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure and social services and provide good job to people all across the social spectrum of Iraq to tamp down sectarian competition over resources. But that was obviously never going to happen because the US refuses to spend money on infrastructure and social services and employment on the imperial core itself.
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Dec 2, 2020 13:51
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feedmegin posted:I mean, if you're going to do that, a big ol' flashlight and Morse code is probably the way to go Well yes, but my version is even sillier and nerdier so I like it more. 
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Dec 2, 2020 15:50
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TaurusTorus posted:I have some pike related questions: Planed. They look like immense pencils. Sort of...staff thick? Ours are thicker so they break less because nobody's war machine will pay for that for you. No but different configurations do exist--different shapes of spearhead. Roughly pencil shaped. I read in one source they do but I don't believe it. They don't. Because "trail pike" is dragging them along by the neck if you do that often enough on a modern road they'll grind themselves against it.
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Dec 2, 2020 15:56
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Trin Tragula posted:Not enough puttees, sorry 
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Dec 2, 2020 15:57
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HEY GUNS posted:ash. I don't think it was but these days it's pretty expensive. Remember that England is an island and central Europe is the opposite of that. Ash coppices really really well  loving ash trees in my yard Funny thing is I learned the term for coppicing just yesterday, and it came up here and in a Tides of History podcast I listened to coincidentally. I've been staring at these Ash, Maples, and Elms and watching them grow this way thinking "hmm there might be some cool way to exploit this poo poo" for some time now.
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Dec 2, 2020 16:10
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Xiahou Dun posted:Well yes, but my version is even sillier and nerdier so I like it more. I like it, but I have a flag based compulsion.
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Dec 2, 2020 16:13
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Phobophilia posted:The US occupation of Iraq/Afghanistan would be unwinnable no matter how many troops got shredded by IEDs or shot in ambushes or doorkicking operations. They could never, ever dimish the legitimacy of their adversaries so long as they continued to occupt Iraq and kill and maim civilians. Like their only option was to immediately dump like 10 times the amount of money on rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure and social services and provide good job to people all across the social spectrum of Iraq to tamp down sectarian competition over resources. Ah yes. “Just throw more money at it”. I think that was the strategy, actually, and it didn’t work. USDA, USAID, the treasury department, the justice department, just about any agency or department you can think of had people on Iraq and Afghanistan working these things.
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Dec 2, 2020 16:43
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:On the whole, I would not say the Brits ever figured out a good system for conducting night bombing raids. The Americans probably had better survival rates in the day time, as escort fighters were available to help and operational losses (due to darkness) lessened. For a while, the British strategy for bombing was to just route bombers through one-by-one, making use of the limits of the German interception system. Basically, only a single bomber could be intercepted at a time, if all bombers flew through a small enough sector of the German radar network. So 1/10 bombers would definitely be lost to interception, while 9/10 were free to wander through. It worked until the Germans tightened up defenses and soon loss rates were like 50%. Miserable stuff, all statistics and death I remember one operational analysis by (I'm sure) the USAAF which concluded that statistically it would be hugely preferable to strip all the defensive armament of bombers entirely - this must have been in about 1943 when the original idea of self-defending 'flying fortress' bomber formations had truly bitten the dust. The logic was that if it requires 'x' amount of bombs to be dropped on a target to complete the objective then bombers with no defensive armament would be able to carry more bombs than those laden with guns, ammo and gunners. The x-amount of bombs could be delivered in fewer sorties and each aircraft carries fewer men, so even if the loss rate goes up the numbers of aircraft and men lost actually goes down. IIRC even if the loss rate tripled the numbers still favoured the unarmed bomber because you were sending fewer aircraft on missions and each aircraft only held three dudes instead of seven. But the conclusion was that you'd never be able to sustain the morale of aircrews required to sit in formations of bombers being harried by fighters with no means of defending themselves and watching their squadron-mates plummeting to earth in a fireball, and the fact that statistically they were better off wouldn't be a comfort when a quarter of your squadron doesn't come back from a mission each time.
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Dec 2, 2020 16:46
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I can't help but think that the math of that doesn't include the fact that the Luftwaffe would change tactics once they realized that the bombers were undefended; they'd just press home every attack until all of the bombers were dead.
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Dec 2, 2020 16:53
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Cessna posted:I can't help but think that the math of that doesn't include the fact that the Luftwaffe would change tactics once they realized that the bombers were undefended; they'd just press home every attack until all of the bombers were dead. Yeah, a change like that would have a reaction.
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Dec 2, 2020 17:01
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Cessna posted:I can't help but think that the math of that doesn't include the fact that the Luftwaffe would change tactics once they realized that the bombers were undefended; they'd just press home every attack until all of the bombers were dead. The analysis was in the context of the new availability of 108-gallon drop tanks for the P-47 and the beginning of development on what would become the P-51D, opening the possibility of bombers having fighter escorts to Germany and back. Presumably they were considered if unarmed but fully escorted bombers worked from an operational and statistical perspective. Given that the late-war B-17s and B-24s only gained more defensive armament alongside increasing numbers of escort fighters, it was obviously not pursued!
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Dec 2, 2020 17:04
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Just building a zillion Mosquitos or Mosquito-like bombers and using them "strategically" would've been the Luftwaffe's worst nightmare.
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Dec 2, 2020 17:08
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Is there a chart I can look at that shows how long aircraft can stay airborne? I have this feeling that modern airframes have significantly longer flight times than prop planes but maybe that's just midair refueling doing the work.
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Dec 2, 2020 17:16
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Xiahou Dun posted:It's obviously impractical, but if you were some kind of crazy person you could make a system of flags that was basically hexadecimal or something and communicate any arbitrarily complex message. It would just take forever, require really specific visibility and everyone has to be able to read your super complex coding language. No need to reinvent the wheel, just implement RFC 4824?
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Dec 2, 2020 17:16
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bewbies posted:Just building a zillion Mosquitos or Mosquito-like bombers and using them "strategically" would've been the Luftwaffe's worst nightmare. UK would have ran out of cabinetmakers and luthiers.
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Dec 2, 2020 17:20
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VanSandman posted:Is there a chart I can look at that shows how long aircraft can stay airborne? I have this feeling that modern airframes have significantly longer flight times than prop planes but maybe that's just midair refueling doing the work. "it varies" An F-15 in long-haul configuration and P-51 have very similar endurance at about 5 hours (the F-15 will go a lot farther in that timespan though). Those two are about as long a legs as you'll find in a single seat fighter. B-29s could do roughly 18-hour missions; a B-52 can stay aloft as long as the crew can handle it, but on a single tank it is limited to around 30 hours, depending on bombload. Meanwhile a Spitfire or MiG-21 will burn through their fuel in well under an hour if the pilot uses a lot of throttle. ChubbyChecker posted:UK would have ran out of cabinetmakers and luthiers. Send the plans to the US, where some mass production furniture company tapped to build them will complain that the tolerances are far too loose.
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Dec 2, 2020 17:25
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bewbies posted:Just building a zillion Mosquitos or Mosquito-like bombers and using them "strategically" would've been the Luftwaffe's worst nightmare. if I'm not mistaken a big part of the sea change in how the air war over Europe went was when Doolittle took over and "unleashed the hounds" - fighters were no longer bound to escort bomber groups all the time, but were instead free to roam and actively prosecute Luftwaffe aircraft where they could be found (of course, this also requires that fighters be long-legged enough to roam over Germany in the first place - they couldn't have done that anyway in 1943 when all they had to work with were Spits and P-47s)
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Dec 2, 2020 17:29
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I have a friend who is doing research on her grandfather and wanted to know if there are any decent military history books (or, say, chapters of books) on the US 3rd Infantry Div in WWII. Is that the sort of thing that exists or is everything studious more topic/theater based?
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Dec 2, 2020 18:03
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There's quite literally a history of 3ID in world war II. It is about sixty bucks on Amazon.
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Dec 2, 2020 18:36
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:The Germans had a lot of success with upward-pointing guns, They called this Schraege Musik, a slang phrase meaning slanted music that they would apply to music with weird time signatures or tuning.
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Dec 2, 2020 18:54
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Greg12 posted:They called this Schraege Musik, a slang phrase meaning slanted music that they would apply to music with weird time signatures or tuning. One of the Nazi's less-offensive terms for jazz. Did they also try dropping fragmentation (air-burst) bombs into formations, although presumably daylight raids?
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Dec 2, 2020 18:56
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Schadenboner posted:One of the Nazi's less-offensive terms for jazz. I know they used giant gently caress off air burst rockets, the Wfr. Gr. 21. I'm not sure about dropping, cause that requires getting nearly an extra km of height to be reasonable, but the Nazis weren't exactly known for sticking with reasonable.
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Dec 2, 2020 19:05
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gradenko_2000 posted:if I'm not mistaken a big part of the sea change in how the air war over Europe went was when Doolittle took over and "unleashed the hounds" - fighters were no longer bound to escort bomber groups all the time, but were instead free to roam and actively prosecute Luftwaffe aircraft where they could be found An interesting tidbit I read, is that this was actually bad for P-51 Pilots, as they were expected to also do ground attack while they roamed around hunting fighters and the P-51 was really bad at ground attack since it wasn't air cooled. More fighters were lost when doing ground attack than were lost in the air supremacy role.
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Dec 2, 2020 19:08
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 Lend-lease wasn't completely one-way, the USAAF got more than a hundred Mosquitos and used them for photo recon.
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Dec 2, 2020 19:19
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FuturePastNow posted:
We also got the Beaufighter! 
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Dec 2, 2020 19:28
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SerCypher posted:We also got the Beaufighter! Im FLUFF. You have to be AMBY.
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Dec 2, 2020 19:31
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bewbies posted:Send the plans to the US, where some mass production furniture company tapped to build them will complain that the tolerances are far too loose. Iirc the one problem that Mosquitos had was they weren't as suited for fordist mass production as metal planes were, because they required such specifically trained workforce. But US could still have built a shitload of them. Did US have many wooden planes in WWII?
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Dec 2, 2020 19:45
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ChubbyChecker posted:Iirc the one problem that Mosquitos had was they weren't as suited for fordist mass production as metal planes were, because they required such specifically trained workforce. But US could still have built a shitload of them. Did US have many wooden planes in WWII? *insert Howard Hughes joke*
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Dec 2, 2020 19:57
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Dec 2, 2020 20:00
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Fearless posted:Near misses can gently caress up a battleship pretty bad too, hydrostatic shock being what it is and all. An AP shell hitting the water will actually level out a bit and can strike the hull underwater, and possibly below the armor belt. The IJN designed their shells to take advantage of this, so your danger space from their heavy guns was a little larger than everyone else's. I'm not aware of any actual underwater hits caused by this system, but it might have played a (small) part in the battleship decisive action they were planning for.
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Dec 2, 2020 20:01
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bewbies posted:Also they tried to deconflict flak and their own fighters operating in the same airspace. All of this went very poorly. Can you tell us more about this because Id love to hear how theyd thought itd work.  Unless it was something like use VERY accurate flak cannons.
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Dec 2, 2020 20:12
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Phobophilia posted:The US occupation of Iraq/Afghanistan would be unwinnable no matter how many troops got shredded by IEDs or shot in ambushes or doorkicking operations. They could never, ever dimish the legitimacy of their adversaries so long as they continued to occupt Iraq and kill and maim civilians. Like their only option was to immediately dump like 10 times the amount of money on rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure and social services and provide good job to people all across the social spectrum of Iraq to tamp down sectarian competition over resources. Dangerously close to modern politics but! The core problem with the occupations of the American occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq was that both were launched with little consideration for what would come after. It was expected by a lot of high-ranking people in the administration that overwhelming US firepower would be able to eradicate all armed opposition in the early days of the war, thus allowing the US to set up a friendly democratic (give or take) government and skedaddle shortly thereafter, like larger-scale versions of the invasions of Grenada and Panama during the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations. But, as the people planning these invasions and occupations were criminally shortsighted idiots, everything went wrong—in Iraq especially, the US didn't even invade with enough troops to secure the country, so much infrastructure damage was done by the invasion that basic services wouldn't be restored for months or even years, insane decisions like disbanding the Iraqi Army and banning the Ba'ath party created a massive ready-made force of people with guns, training, and political connections who had a direct reason to hate the occupying forces, and of course pre-existing sectarian tensions were poorly understood by the occupation authorities and allowed to ferment until exploding into massive violence—And that's before you get into the conduct of the occupying US forces and poo poo like Abu Ghraib that actively raised tensions. And once all this had happened (Within the first weeks after the invasion), there was no amount of money or manpower that could have prevented the insurgency that by then was already well in progress. There's actually a part of me that thinks that, maybe, the insurgency in Iraq could have been avoided altogether with proper planning and manpower for the invasion and literally any planning for the occupation, a clear understanding of the region and the underlying tensions, and better efforts to work with or outright co-opt existing institutions like the Iraqi Army and Ba'ath Party to provide legitimacy to the new regime. But of course, there's no guarantee it wouldn't have been a shitshow regardless, and an administration that cared about this kind of planning probably wouldn't have invaded Iraq in the first place. Anyway! Back to World War II: Jobbo_Fett posted:Your sights don't change. Its all a matter of distance and the characteristics of a particular shell. Some do! Different gunsights will have different markings or zoom options that are optimized for engaging different kinds of targets. For instance, as it was designed as self-propelled artillery, the StuG III's sights were better optimized for engaging long-range targets than the contemporary Panzer IV or Panther, which combined with the crew's artillery training ended up making the humble assault gun one of the most effective AFVs of the war.
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Dec 2, 2020 20:13
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ChubbyChecker posted:Iirc the one problem that Mosquitos had was they weren't as suited for fordist mass production as metal planes were, because they required such specifically trained workforce. But US could still have built a shitload of them. Did US have many wooden planes in WWII? I don't think it used many all-wood planes. Things like the Cessna AT-17 and the Waco glider had wooden components, but were also substantially metal. Fairchild's trainers likewise used a lot of wood but the fuselage was steel-tube. The C-76 was all-wood but production was canceled and only a few were built. The XP-77 never went past a prototype. The Beech AT-10 was all-wood, around 2000 were built. So not many at all compared to deHavilland aircraft.
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Dec 2, 2020 20:27
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Xiahou Dun posted:Well yes, but my version is even sillier and nerdier so I like it more. MTP I vol 2 is a base 66 version of this that already includes specific flags for maneuver. Putting flag stands on tanks will look very samurai. I approve.
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Dec 2, 2020 21:21
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What is the smallest military boat that would be meant for a crew to be on long-term for weeks at a time? I'm trying to get my head around the smaller end of independent vehicles. I found an interesting diagram of a PT boat, and I'm interested if there's anything else really small.
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Dec 2, 2020 21:25
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PT boats aren't "weeks at a time", they're meant to operate from a nearby base and can't operate independently for long. I seem to recall that they occasionally got towed to operational areas by bigger boats with more endurance, because of their limited fuel storage. For weeks at a time, I think you're looking at Flower-class corvettes or similar ships. ASW-dedicated convoy escort craft, basically. They're pretty miserable but still a lot bigger than a PT boat.
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Dec 2, 2020 21:35
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