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FastestGunAlive posted:One of the other nice things about modern boots is you have a variety of brands to choose from, approved by your branch, so just about everyone is able to find what “works” for them. I like really light weight boots, for example, and I’ve done a lot of matching in them, while others I know swear by heavier ones. poo poo, I'm jealous. I was in during the "black boot" days. Your only choice was boots your size or not your size. Eventually they made jungle boots an option. These were awful.
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Jul 7, 2021 15:37
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I’m doing a political SIM of the Korean War over in the game room. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3972785&perpage=40&noseen=1
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Jul 7, 2021 15:54
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wiegieman posted:Peltast was a name for a light shield, a Greek skirmisher was known as a psiloi. I thought - and I could be wrong here - that "psiloi" was a later term, used more by the Byzantines than the Classical Greeks? I can't find a source for this, so I could be mistaken.
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Jul 7, 2021 15:57
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CommonShore posted:If we stretch he sense of "possible" beyond "politically acceptable back home" and simply look at it in the sense of "can be executed on a practical and material level," short of the US/Allies doing a 180 and saying "ok war is over we are now friends, here is shitloads of food right now for your people," is there any course of action that could be taken, even with the benefit of hindsight, that doesn't result in incomprehensible heaps of corpses? I mean, sure. If the U.S. says "no, we're okay with conditional surrender, you get to keep the Emperor and no serious war crimes tribunals" - which is largely what they said after the surrender - then maybe there's a negotiated peace well prior to August. But again, that assumes that a) the U.S. knows these are the sticking points; b) the Japanese government doesn't react to that with a counter offer to see what else they can get, delaying the peace process by months; and c) the U.S. no longer cares about preventing future aggression by Imperial Japan because they have foresight as to how the Cold War will develop and so their strategic goals are completely different. Likewise, if Imperial Japan goes, "Oh, hey, we just had a coup and now we're a pacifist democracy willing to unconditionally surrender because gently caress the Emperor and his war crimes staff", then the war probably could have been over much sooner, but that's essentially creating a pro-democracy, anti-Imperial faction in the government out of whole cloth when the actual government had a coup the day before surrender from a few generals who weren't willing to surrender even after the atomic bomb. But even by this point you're still at incomprehensible heaps of corpses - even outside of the atomic bombs, it's estimated that convention bombing of Japan had killed half a million civilians, and that doesn't include upwards of a million Japanese soldiers and civilians who had died of starvation during the course of the war. And hunger in Japan would remain a major issue for a decade afterwards as they rebuilt. You'd have to end the war largely before American bombing and mining operations occurred, so really at some point in late 1944, first quarter of 1945, the composition of the Japanese government would have to massively change and switch over to accepting surrender... which, again, they weren't really keen on even seven months of bombing later. None of which prevents the massive famines in China, Vietnam, or Indonesia that occurred in 1942 - 1944 in the areas being fought over, so all you're doing is sparing the Japanese from absolute horror while not mitigating the horrors inflicted on their subject persons, which means really to avoid any of the hell that came with World War II in the Pacific, you really have to go back to the 1930s and maybe have the February Coup of 1936 lead to Hirohito deciding that absolute pacifism was the only way forward rather than that the Army had cool people in it he should trust more. (note: my expertise is American politics; my knowledge of Imperial Japan politics is pretty weak)
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Jul 7, 2021 16:46
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skeleton warrior posted:I mean, sure. If the U.S. says "no, we're okay with conditional surrender, you get to keep the Emperor and no serious war crimes tribunals" - which is largely what they said after the surrender - then maybe there's a negotiated peace well prior to August. But again, that assumes that a) the U.S. knows these are the sticking points; b) the Japanese government doesn't react to that with a counter offer to see what else they can get, delaying the peace process by months; and c) the U.S. no longer cares about preventing future aggression by Imperial Japan because they have foresight as to how the Cold War will develop and so their strategic goals are completely different. Yeah I was contemplating the subject peoples in this as well. A light hand against the Imperial core would probably lead to at least as much terrible in the occupied (or even iberated) territories outside of the home islands.
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Jul 7, 2021 16:54
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Hey, what's the thread opinion on the youtube channel The Great War? Iirc they started out strong, but did they keep that up? I was looking for some 1920s pop history and turns out they're done with the War and now they're onto... all the wars after the war to end wars.
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Jul 7, 2021 18:56
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CommonShore posted:If we stretch he sense of "possible" beyond "politically acceptable back home" and simply look at it in the sense of "can be executed on a practical and material level," short of the US/Allies doing a 180 and saying "ok war is over we are now friends, here is shitloads of food right now for your people," is there any course of action that could be taken, even with the benefit of hindsight, that doesn't result in incomprehensible heaps of corpses? As I recall the only way Japan avoided a massive famine in the immediate post-war was the US doing that 180 and provisioning the Home Islands. By 1945 Japan's infrastructure and shipping capacity is gone, and there isn't anywhere to get it except for the Allied powers.
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Jul 7, 2021 18:59
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:As I recall the only way Japan avoided a massive famine in the immediate post-war was the US doing that 180 and provisioning the Home Islands. By 1945 Japan's infrastructure and shipping capacity is gone, and there isn't anywhere to get it except for the Allied powers. My grandfather grew up on a farm. He fought in the Pacific in the US Army, and was with one of the units set to invade Japan. Immediately after the war ended they were sent in to occupy Japan itself. He and some of the other farm kids from his unit were quickly pulled out and sent to help with the food distribution and agricultural rebuilding. He ended up forming lasting friendships with the Japanese people he worked with, to the point that several of them flew to the States to attend his funeral 60 years later.
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Jul 7, 2021 19:18
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I wish I could find sources on just how much food was shipped by the US to Asia after the war. It's so hard to impress upon people just how bad even a couple months more staying at war would've been
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Jul 7, 2021 19:21
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Do I remember a chart or something showing how short the Japanese wartime generation was due to malnutrition?
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Jul 7, 2021 19:49
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Argas posted:Probably a mix of it being slightly more aerodynamic with the back of the turret and so the barrel doesn't get in the way of flying/landing. weight and balance might factor in as well Cessna posted:My grandfather grew up on a farm. He fought in the Pacific in the US Army, and was with one of the units set to invade Japan. Sounds like a good dude. MacArthur Japan was wild. My Nisei great uncles were over there with very unclear post-MIS remits in the occupying forces. For one of them the job mostly consisted of facilitating a robust black market with the Japanese cleaning ladies. They prioritized officer's uniforms for dry cleaning if they had dates, in return for copious quantities of cigarettes and food. It got split up between the cleaning ladies and my great uncle, who used it to bribe his way in to all the post war Tokyo nightlife spots.
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Jul 7, 2021 19:50
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Was that post-war aid unprecedented? That Germany and Japan are among the most peaceful and prosperous nations on Earth today speaks to the benefit of the practice, but sacking the city and salting the earth seems to be what normally happened through history. Also, what motivated it? Was the view in 1945 that reparations and debt put on Germany in the Treaty of Versallies created the conditions that led to WWII, and that needed to be avoided? Simple humanitarianism?
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Jul 7, 2021 19:59
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More than a bit of concern regarding Communist Uprisings. And anti-Soviet Union stuff in general.
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Jul 7, 2021 20:01
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zoux posted:Also, what motivated it? You don't wan them to turn Commie, do you?
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Jul 7, 2021 20:02
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It's always the specter of communism... How did we even come together as a country in the 18th century without there being communism to oppose
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Jul 7, 2021 20:03
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zoux posted:It's always the specter of communism... place in the sun / imperialism / jingoism
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Jul 7, 2021 20:08
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zoux posted:It's always the specter of communism... Well there was a bit of a rough spot that didn't really get settled in the 1860s.
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Jul 7, 2021 20:10
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That's a bit reductive. Trying to prevent the states from collapsing was obviously a goal. But the us did legitimately want to create a peaceful Democratic state. Adjusting for inflation the us spent 16 billion dollars on famine relief for japan in 1946 alone
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Jul 7, 2021 20:13
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Goddamn it we will rebuild the entire economy of Western Europe and Japan and even go to the loving moon if it owns commies.
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Jul 7, 2021 20:15
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zoux posted:It's always the specter of communism... An unpopular king provides a decent rallying cry. The increasingly punitive punishments from a tone-deaf and distant ruling government, up to and including waging outright war against them, converted the overall populace from loyal (if mildly annoyed) subjects to strident republicans over the decade of 1765-1775 or so.
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Jul 7, 2021 20:15
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Eh. It was also seen as the Good Christian Thing To Do, building off of the Commission for Relief in Belgium from World War I, which was set up well before Communism was a spectre in Europe. The CRB was the reason that Herbert Hoover came to prominence and ended up in Harding's cabinet (and later became President), and for that reason Truman asked Hoover to oversee post-World War II humanitarian relief as well.
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Jul 7, 2021 20:15
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Yeah it was 100% about keeping the commies out. Remember that the Marshall Plan doesn't happen right away, a couple years pass before the American administration realized that Germany was not going to bounce back, and drastic action was going to be required to prop up non-Soviet Europe.
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Jul 7, 2021 20:22
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The US economy also needed growing export markets so the program was seen as a win-win by its proponents. After WW2 global trade was in tatters, US industries had virtually unlimited capacity but foreign clients had very limited purchase power for mysterious reasons.
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Jul 7, 2021 20:30
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Good lord, guys, the Marshall Plan wasn't the only aid plan the US offered to the defeated nations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GARIOA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensed_Agencies_for_Relief_in_Asia https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/executive-order-9205-establishing-the-presidents-war-relief-control-board Anyways, yes, the Marshall plan was about helping Europe rebuild and loaning money to Europe to keep the Commies out and the markets going. But there were plenty of other aid programs going on that were funded by, or coordinated by the US government all on the idea of "we should actually help people hurt by the war" well beyond what the Marshall Plan did. skeleton warrior fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Jul 7, 2021 |
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Jul 7, 2021 20:41
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About the other part of my question: have we seen any kind of rebuilding aid from the winners to the losers in wars prior to WWII
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Jul 7, 2021 21:09
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zoux posted:About the other part of my question: have we seen any kind of rebuilding aid from the winners to the losers in wars prior to WWII After World War 1, the US set up the American Relief Administration, which provided food and medical aid to countries in Europe, including the Soviet Union. The initial budget was 100 million dollars (1.4 billion in inflation adjusted money), but ultimately the US spent 220 million on ARA between 1919 and 1923 (3.4 billion dollars in inflation adjusted money). The ARA was run by Herbert Hoover, who had run the predecessor organization that had been operating throughout the war.
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Jul 7, 2021 21:30
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Siivola posted:Hey, what's the thread opinion on the youtube channel The Great War? Iirc they started out strong, but did they keep that up? I was looking for some 1920s pop history and turns out they're done with the War and now they're onto... all the wars after the war to end wars. They are fine afaik, they do at the very least put their sources beneath the video and there are usually quite a few of them which means you can judge for yourself how reliable they are likely to be on a given topic. I gave up watching just because i got tired of the format rather than because i thought they had a dropoff in quality.
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Jul 7, 2021 21:37
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zoux posted:About the other part of my question: have we seen any kind of rebuilding aid from the winners to the losers in wars prior to WWII According to some unverified sources, Romans graciously provided valuable minerals to Carthagean farmers after their victory, and more verifiably provided job opportunities to the citizens.
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Jul 7, 2021 22:09
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Nenonen posted:According to some unverified sources, Romans graciously provided valuable minerals to Carthagean farmers after their victory, and more verifiably provided job opportunities to the citizens. Oof. Complicated things like rebuilding Japan and Germany are rarely done for a single reason. Keeping the commies out was definitely part of the calculus; but so was avoiding the kind of hardship and resentment post WW 1 that led to the rise of fascism in Germany to begin with. Using a lighter touch and keeping local government in place also means you don't have to fight a decades long insurgency as an occupying power.
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Jul 7, 2021 22:30
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Captain von Trapp posted:Oh hey, good opportunity for a random Greek question: how much crossover is there between biblical and classical Greek? I.e., if a person learns to read biblical Greek competently at a seminary or whatever, can they also read Thucydides, or people from different eras like Plato or Homer? I didn't make any effort to seriously study Attic, and didn't make an concerted effort to plow on through Thucydides, so I don't know how much effort, subjectively, it would have taken to make the leap.
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Jul 8, 2021 03:04
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Cessna posted:I thought - and I could be wrong here - that "psiloi" was a later term, used more by the Byzantines than the Classical Greeks? The Byzantines did describe their lightest equipped combatants that way, and further reading does suggest that the modern distinction of the term might have originated with them reading Roman military manuals - though the term does come from the ancient Greek "psilos", or "bare." I'd trust CrypticFox's knowledge of the subject over mine, I'm just a dabbler.
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Jul 8, 2021 05:15
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SubG posted:Many years ago I was fluent-for-scholarship in Koine and in fact I picked up a copy of History of the Peloponnesian War and found it more or less only barely comprehensible. CrypticFox has provided details explaining the why, but personally I frequently felt like I could understand the majority of the vocabulary and frequently could understand the general sense but would feel more like I was decrypting rather than reading or even translating, if that makes sense. Part of the problem there is going to be the fact Thucydides is incredibly dense, and hard for everyone to understand. His syntax is very convoluted, since he doesn't really believe in ending sentences until he is absolutely forced to (one of his particularly bad sentences comes out to 134 words when translated). Since word order is flexible in Greek, and different from English, this leads to situations where there can be 20 or 30 words separating a verb and its subject. Other classical authors generally do not do this, at least not the same extent that Thucydides does, unless they are a philosopher or poet who is intentionally trying to be hard to understand. We looked at a passage from Thucydides briefly in my Greek class last quarter, and we were all going very slowly through it, even the people who had been doing Attic Greek for 4 years. I'm also no expert, I'm just an undergraduate student who has taken a little over a year of Greek, so I may have judged the difficulty of the jump incorrectly. I've only ever studied Attic in a class, I've never done anything specifically on Koine.
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Jul 8, 2021 08:10
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zoux posted:About the other part of my question: have we seen any kind of rebuilding aid from the winners to the losers in wars prior to WWII ACOUP is part way through a series which talks about Rome's treatment of conquered Italian polities. Apparently while they were expected to provide soldiers they received a share of the plunder. https://acoup.blog/category/collections/the-queens-latin/ I expect this sort of rebuilding and investment is fairly common for territories that have been subject to continued rule by their conquerors.
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Jul 8, 2021 08:56
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wiegieman posted:Peltast was a name for a light shield, a Greek skirmisher was known as a psiloi. "Pelta" is the name of the shield, peltast means a soldier who carried a pelta. Same kind of thing with hoplites being dudes carrying hoplon shields.
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Jul 8, 2021 11:39
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Question: how did you actually physically set convergence on a WW2 fighter's guns? Lets say generic Spitfire in the Battle of Britain, because those pilots accounts generally have a bit where early on they get the mechanics to drop the convergence from whatever the standard was all the way down to something silly close like 75 yards.
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Jul 8, 2021 11:42
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Gort posted:"Pelta" is the name of the shield, peltast means a soldier who carried a pelta. Same kind of thing with hoplites being dudes carrying hoplon shields. hoplon was the term for all their weaponry, aspis was the name for their shield
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Jul 8, 2021 11:47
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Alchenar posted:Question: how did you actually physically set convergence on a WW2 fighter's guns? Lets say generic Spitfire in the Battle of Britain, because those pilots accounts generally have a bit where early on they get the mechanics to drop the convergence from whatever the standard was all the way down to something silly close like 75 yards. You change the way the gun is physically mounted in the wing by adjusting the brackets holding it in there.
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Jul 8, 2021 12:02
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Alchenar posted:Question: how did you actually physically set convergence on a WW2 fighter's guns? Lets say generic Spitfire in the Battle of Britain, because those pilots accounts generally have a bit where early on they get the mechanics to drop the convergence from whatever the standard was all the way down to something silly close like 75 yards. Polyakov posted:You change the way the gun is physically mounted in the wing by adjusting the brackets holding it in there. here's a video of a plane at a shooting range: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tk5Yp-yPhU
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Jul 8, 2021 12:20
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Nenonen posted:According to some unverified sources, Romans graciously provided valuable minerals to Carthagean farmers after their victory, and more verifiably provided job opportunities to the citizens. Romans were all about providing job opportunities to the people of the nations they defeated. Silver miner, entertainer, and so forth.
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Jul 8, 2021 13:16
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One thing that didn't enter into the calculus for US aid to Germany/Japan, but very much *was* a contentious issue for the British and French who had been under much harsher rationing than the US for a long time, and therefore it was considered by many in those countries that every bit of food that went o Germany and Japan was food being taken off the table for people back home. It was a very delicate political task to convince the populations of victorious nations that, actually, they had to suck it up a bit more so that "their" food could continue to be shipped to these countries that had just started a massively destructive war.
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Jul 8, 2021 13:32
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