|
Apropos of nothing I remembered this video exists https://youtu.be/DDk1zGnEwgE
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 19:46
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 3, 2024 14:36 |
|
|
Scratch Monkey posted:Apropos of nothing I remembered this video exists Lol I had not seen that. Also, this has never happened before but somehow this video had like a special warning or something and I had to click to be able to watch it, like it's been reported or something. Also wow, some of the comments.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 19:55
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:IIRC there were other reasons they had for wanting to back-bench patton. He had a really nasty habit of outrunning his supplies and didn't coordinate well with other armies at all. There was also the Battle of Metz which is pretty much as close to WW1 style warfare as we saw on the Western Front in WW2. At the time there was some criticism of Patton for opting for a frontal assault, and I'm pretty sure that's born out in the modern scholarship. The Nazi generals rated Patton because his flaws were their flaws and promoting him was an easier option than confronting their own doctrinal issues.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 20:21
|
|
|
Foxtrot_13 posted:
He was constantly saying weird stuff and alienating crowds over his WWII career. He was also much lower ranking and had very little political instinct or ambition. It's doubtful he would have any reputation beyond that with his soldiers. The Patton conspiracy theories are some of the funniest. I'm trying to imagine the conversation where somebody plans the assassination of a semi-disgraced old guy via lethal application of low-speed vehicle collision.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 20:30
|
|
|
Scratch Monkey posted:Apropos of nothing I remembered this video exists I can't decide which is best, but "Dolf Dolf" and "Erich Panzerkind" are definitely up there.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 21:16
|
|
|
So here is a model of U-190, a U-boat that was captured at the end of WW2, and served briefly in the Canadian navy. It is a Type IXC/40: So my question is what is up with that pinch of space on deck forward of the conning tower. What is that/what is it for?
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 21:25
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:I can't decide which is best, but "Dolf Dolf" and "Erich Panzerkind" are definitely up there. I'm partial to Friedrich Reichsrichenreichraucherreich myself.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 21:28
|
|
|
Randarkman posted:I'm partial to Friedrich Reichsrichenreichraucherreich myself. I wouldn't argue with you too much. They're all pretty great, so any debate would mostly just be listing them and laughing. U. U. U. S. *giant loving pause* Hess.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 21:34
|
|
|
Alchenar posted:The Nazi generals rated Patton I thought they didn't care about him at all.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 21:57
|
|
|
Xakura posted:I thought they didn't care about him at all. I remember reading that Hitler specifically thought he was the best Allied general and wanted to know where he was all the time. I am a Patton stan from childhood. As an adult I acknowledge that he made loads of mistakes and was nuts in many ways, but also horribly out of place in the US Army. A sympathetic mentor at the right time might have been able to teach him to curb his worst tendencies and make the most of his gifts. Instead, he turned into a military edgelord, and went the way of all edgelords.
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 22:51
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 23:06
|
|
|
Zorak of Michigan posted:Instead, he turned into a military edgelord, and went the way of all edgelords. Dead in some random car accident while walking his dog?
|
|
#
?
Nov 28, 2021 23:11
|
|
|
Randarkman posted:Dead in some random car accident while walking his dog? Killed by a a conspiracy of thieves trying to hide the theft of gold bullion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABbjHHOS6iQ
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 00:56
|
|
|
It's been about five years since I posted in these threads, and I am not sure what is permissible. Are effortposts by non-historian types still OK in here? I have one I'd like to do, and I have no credentials other than having read a lot of books, watched all of the video accounts I could find, and having talked to a family friend 35 years ago who served in the particular engagement, which took place about 55 years ago. Basically I'm an amateur history nerd, I have zero credibility, I got nothing except my own interpretation of the events.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 01:22
|
|
|
MrMojok posted:It's been about five years since I posted in these threads, and I am not sure what is permissible. 
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 01:43
|
|
|
Nebakenezzer posted:So here is a model of U-190, a U-boat that was captured at the end of WW2, and served briefly in the Canadian navy. It is a Type IXC/40: It's called the schnelltauchback - 'quick-diving foredeck'. As the name implies, it was a mod done to the Type IXs to try and improve their lethargic dive times, which was becoming ever more of a problem as Allied air cover intensified. It removed an area of the casing which wasn't used for storage or to house fuel or equipment and which tended to trap air, and it allowed water to get 'on top' of the submarine more quickly, help push the bow and the forward hydroplanes down and give the sub some down-pitching momentum. It was supposed to take about 15 seconds of the surface-to-periscope-depth time, but it still took about a minute.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 02:00
|
|
|
MrMojok posted:It's been about five years since I posted in these threads, and I am not sure what is permissible. Remember Cunningham's Law. The best way to get a right answer is to post a wrong answer.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 02:12
|
|
|
BalloonFish posted:It's called the schnelltauchback - 'quick-diving foredeck'. As the name implies, it was a mod done to the Type IXs to try and improve their lethargic dive times, which was becoming ever more of a problem as Allied air cover intensified. Do any submarines (current or previous) use pumps to flood spaces faster, or is it all reliant on water pressure? ...I guess you're still limited by how fast water can flow into your pump inlet so I don't know if it would actually help.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 02:33
|
|
|
MrMojok posted:It's been about five years since I posted in these threads, and I am not sure what is permissible. Yeah this isn't the Reddit ask historians thread or w/e, we have a bunch of people with doctorates and suchlike in here but pretty much nobody is being paid money by any institution to history.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 16:25
|
|
|
Tulip posted:I honestly figured American English had more because I end up using a few sounds exclusively for loan words (e.g. chutzpah) Alright now pronounce 'loch'
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 16:33
|
|
|
Quick question, generally how were next of kin in the US informed of a death in WWII? I've seen people showing up on doorsteps, but I'm not sure how widespread that was. The reason I ask is how did the US handle death notifications for Black soldiers (or any POC for that matter)?
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 16:46
|
|
|
MazelTovCocktail posted:Quick question, generally how were next of kin in the US informed of a death in WWII? I've seen people showing up on doorsteps, but I'm not sure how widespread that was. A quick google search says that people were informed by telegram after the fatality was reported and I imagine it would not be too different for POC in general.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 16:50
|
|
|
So did the "show up at the door" thing not happen?
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 16:56
|
|
|
The "officers show up at your door" thing was mostly a hollywood embellishment. No idea where that came from. The dude at your door in WW2 was the Western Union delivery guy, and the real mind gently caress was that you didn't know if it was going to be good, neutral, or bad. Note that people used western union for long distance, fast communication in general back then, although if you were on the poorer end of the scale chances are the first time you got one was when your kid got hurt or killed. Here's one where the person was "slightly wounded"  And here's one for a KIA:  And an MIA (note that this is "over Germany" so probably a flier):  Of course not all of it would be bad. With luck the family of the flier above would get a follow up telegram like this one, saying someone's loved one is a POW:  POW isn't great, but it's better than the alternative. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Nov 29, 2021 |
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 17:01
|
|
|
I think it was either Korea or Vietnam where the US Army realised 'holy poo poo this is really bad we need to send someone in person to deliver this news'.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 17:03
|
|
|
What I've always wondered was if the government got a special rate on those thing or if writing them out all wordy like that was a way to show they were serious about expressing their deepest condolances. Because I've got a few that my grandfather sent right after the war and they're all super loving brief and fractured reading because he was poor/cheap and trying to squeeze it down to the minimum. He sent one when he got back to the states that was basically: "IN US. ON TRAIN. WEEK OR SO <GRANDPA's FIRST NAME>"
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 17:11
|
|
|
Hunt11 posted:A quick google search says that people were informed by telegram after the fatality was reported and I imagine it would not be too different for POC in general. Apart from Japanese, who had some segregated (I think) battalions and regiments that fought in Europe, were other non-White soldiers segregated though or statistically separated from the White soldiers? Like IIRC there's been some concern that Hispanic Americans often appear quite invisible in the history of the war compared to African Americans and Japanese, because by and large they served on equal terms as White soldiers, which has presented issues of it being pretty simple to overlook and write out their participation.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 17:11
|
|
|
At what point in history did they start notifying family members of casualties? I imagine for thousands of years it was like "welp, he hasn't come back after 2 years now, probably not going to happen I guess"
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 17:17
|
|
|
Randarkman posted:Apart from Japanese, who had some segregated (I think) battalions and regiments that fought in Europe, were other non-White soldiers segregated though or statistically separated from the White soldiers? Like IIRC there's been some concern that Hispanic Americans often appear quite invisible in the history of the war compared to African Americans and Japanese, because by and large they served on equal terms as White soldiers, which has presented issues of it being pretty simple to overlook and write out their participation. Yes. The US Military didn't begin integration until 1948, an the last segregated unit disbanded a few years after Korea. poo poo can get weird service-to-service, with for example the USN technically having non-white people serving on the same ships as whites, but in roles like cook etc. You can find plenty of African-American units in the Army. Off the top of my head I don't know of any all-hispanic units (although there was an Arizona National Guard unit that saw a lot of action in the Philippines and came close to being one just due to the demography of the area), but you also have to remember that the military was operating off a very 1940s idea of race, so my gut would be that a fairer-skinned hispanic guy would be "white" and a darker one might be "colored" and then sorted as such. I don't know for sure, that's just based on other poo poo I've seen regarding that kind of thing in the 30s-50s.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 17:17
|
|
|
Randarkman posted:Were the British and Americans the only ones of the WW2 majors who sort of treated psychological casualties as legitimate? I think I remember reading or hearing at one point that this was not the case with either the Germans or Soviet, and I wouldn't imagine, if that's true, that the Japanese did either. No, that's not true regarding the Wehrmacht. Remember, they were evil and genocidal - and inefficient at seemingly every level - but they were also very intent on being "scientific." If they thought a science could give them an advantage, they'd use it. I'll quote an online paper because it's more concise than I'd be, and this is backed by other sources I can dig up if you like: quote:Like other sciences, psychology was used by the Nazis in their effort to gear up for war. In The Wehrmacht used psychology throughout the war to treat their soldiers and officers and keep them fighting. Like everything else this system broke down as the war became more desperate - by 1942 they stopped psychologically screening officer candidates - but it was extensively used by the Wehrmacht throughout the war.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 17:25
|
|
|
i had to do a month as a casualty notification officer, man was that fun the only time i can think of a movie doing an in-person notification was saving private ryan, and that was kind of a unique case. a league of their own has a great scene with the telegram guy
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 17:39
|
|
|
Cessna posted:No, that's not true regarding the Wehrmacht. Thanks for the answer, still not quite what I was looking for as I was thinking more about how whether people who suffered shell shock or other forms of combat fatigue and stress would be counted as somewhat legitimate casualties. Though your answer there seems to fit in with something else that I think I read/heard about the German military in that they very specifically sought to foster and rely on low-level group psychology (and specifically peer expectations and pressure) in their training as a vehicle for building morale, cohesion and providing a motivation to fight and follow orders. I believe they did that based on some studies or experiments the military had conducted in the 20s or early 30s that advocated the efficiency of this over harsh discipline and corporal punishment.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 17:41
|
|
|
bewbies posted:i had to do a month as a casualty notification officer, man was that fun The Vietnam version of it is a big part of We Were Soldiers as well, since at the time of Ia Drang they were just giving telegrams to cab drivers and then heavy combat started.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 17:44
|
|
|
Randarkman posted:Apart from Japanese, who had some segregated (I think) battalions and regiments that fought in Europe, were other non-White soldiers segregated though or statistically separated from the White soldiers? Like IIRC there's been some concern that Hispanic Americans often appear quite invisible in the history of the war compared to African Americans and Japanese, because by and large they served on equal terms as White soldiers, which has presented issues of it being pretty simple to overlook and write out their participation. Segregation and different treatment was a major issue during both of the world wars. Especially when it came to being stationed overseas where the local population could earn the ire of white soldiers by not being as racist as they were. It was such an issue that when they were prepping soldiers for being stationed in the UK they had to include a segment just about this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltVtnCzg9xw&t=1505s
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 18:10
|
|
|
Cessna posted:No, that's not true regarding the Wehrmacht. Hell, one of the major reasons why they held a big meeting to decide how to more efficiently kill all those undesirables was that they were seeing a LOT of really negative psychological effects on the trigger pullers that they had doing the big massacres in the east. The whole reason the gas chambers were settled on was that they didn't want to have to deal with an entire generation of psychologically scarred people who had to murder millions the old fashioned way. This also dovetails into how they conceived of combat vets in peace time and their post-war role in society. The tl;dr is that these were supposed to be the paragons of Good German (Nazi) Virtues, the honored warriors who had secured a future for the Volk and who would now take up leadership positions big and small in society to steward its future. We're talking everything from politicians to school teachers. The image of the scarred vet leading a classroom and explaining civic virtues was one that they held really dear. You know the scene with the gruff, ex-military history teacher in the Veerhoven Starship Troopers? That's satire of fascism, but the satirical version is a pretty solid image of what they actually wanted. Only it would be a dude (perhaps with a tastefully pinned up shirt sleeve) who had been an NCO on the Eastern Front explaining why it was everyone's duty to have six kids and help colonize the newly-empty But apparently shooting a few dozen women and children in the back of the head with a bolt action rifle was a bit much and was producing some incredibly broken people - beyond even the standards of the usual frontline combatant PTSD - to the point where the question was more "can we build enough sanitariums to take care of them post-war" than "will they be suitable to be primary school teachers?" So, stick all the people we want to get rid of in camps, use an industrial process to kill them, use prison labor to clean out the gas chambers and put them in crematoria, "process" those prisoners too, eventually, and keep the staffing of actual Germans in the camps to a bare minimum. This way we can have our Holocaust and still get those cuddly battle-scared NCO third grade teachers that we're banking on for the 50s and 60s.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 18:20
|
|
|
One of the most notable things when you start getting into the literature on the people who did the actual killing in the big massacres is just how loving important alcohol was to it all. When there was going to be a big killing action they organized a few things, but the most important were transportation, a suitable killing site, ammo, and as much booze as they could lay their hands on. The shooters would get loaded before doing the shooting, take frequent breaks to get even more poo poo faced, and then were basically considered worthless for anything but sitting around drunk for a couple days afterwards at the least. And these are people who are on-board with the 'necessity' of killing all of these people. Someone who wasn't on board would get shunted off to guarding a parking lot during the killing process etc.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 18:24
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Hell, one of the major reasons why they held a big meeting to decide how to more efficiently kill all those undesirables was that they were seeing a LOT of really negative psychological effects on the trigger pullers that they had doing the big massacres in the east. The whole reason the gas chambers were settled on was that they didn't want to have to deal with an entire generation of psychologically scarred people who had to murder millions the old fashioned way. I think I've seen you talk about this before - was it because they didn't want to scar a generation out of hosed-up Nazi mercy, or was it because they weren't going to be able to find enough people to agree, even liquored and drugged to the gills?
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 18:26
|
|
|
Flappy Bert posted:I think I've seen you talk about this before - was it because they didn't want to scar a generation out of hosed-up Nazi mercy, or was it because they weren't going to be able to find enough people to agree, even liquored and drugged to the gills? The fastest period of murders in the Holocaust is in late 1941 where you have groups of Jews being taken out of captured Russian cities in trains out into the woods and literally machine-gunned as they're pulled out of the carriages. It was fast but even the self-selecting virulent anti-semites who volunteered for this duty because they wanted to murder innocents that much were having psychotic breakdowns within two weeks of doing this. This is really the thing that makes the Holocaust a unique crime in history. Plenty of other mass murders, several other genocides. But this is the only one that was deliberately planned out to work as an industrial process that would clinically grind on until the work was done without any risk that the people involved would stop wanting to murder others.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 18:36
|
|
|
Hunt11 posted:Segregation and different treatment was a major issue during both of the world wars. Especially when it came to being stationed overseas where the local population could earn the ire of white soldiers by not being as racist as they were. It was such an issue that when they were prepping soldiers for being stationed in the UK they had to include a segment just about this topic. Yep. There were two race riots on British soil between black American soldiers and white MPs (Bamber Bridge and Park Street in Bristol) but lots of low level harassment by white GIs on black GIs who didn't like the local white people fraternising with the black troops. By all accounts at the time the black GIs were better behaved than their white counterparts (but then they had to be very polite to white people in the states). Some politicians were happy to follow American demands to segregate Britain but this was not a generally popular idea, even with the deep seated racism at a time. The British army was not officially segregated at the time but the regiments were geographically based and the African/Indian/Caribbean/Asian regiments had mostly white officers. The RAF and RN had black members and racism was rife but not official. A number of Caribbean and African pilots flew in the Battle of Britain for instance. The New Zealanders took even less poo poo from American GIs who wanted to segregate the places they drank in. These incidents culminated in a day long brawl with the white and Maori New Zealand soldiers and the American GIs on Manners Street in Wellington.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 18:38
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 3, 2024 14:36 |
|
|
They cared about the welfare of the executioners - they were brave patriotic germans doing what needed to be done for the motherland. The manpower sink of constant replacement of executioners due to breakdown hammered it home, but it's not like they had to go hunting for hardened immoral killers for this type of work.
|
|
#
?
Nov 29, 2021 18:38
|
|
