KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

the Ottoman ships purchased from British yards were actually straw purchases for the KM.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

the modern German ships were pretty long legged and were good sea boats; the Koenigs had 8,000 nautical mile range at 12 knots, which is longer than either the QEs or the R classes. Crew accommodations were spartan but you just follow similar KM doctrine of berthing ashore.

MikeCrotch posted:

Somewhere in the Admiralty a monkey's paw curls

ChubbyChecker posted:

How many pounds did it cost to construct a battleship the size of Bayern or Derfflinger?

feedmegin posted:

That's a bit of a 'just' there, don't you think? That's precisely why I'm saying having them the other side of the Atlantic is a bit less of a concern. Powers that aren't called France or Britain don't generally have friendly 'ashores' all over the world. 8000 nautical miles at 12 knots is literally coming up on a month.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

The QEs cost about three million pounds, but they were a bit experimental. The Iron Dukes cost about two million pounds, and were fairly similar in size and capability to the Koenigs. I am not entirely sure if that includes cost of guns but I think it likely does. All nations did fucky poo poo with their naval budgets.

I can probably dig up the exact tenders for the Koenigs (in 1911) if you want but it'll take some more doing. Once the war hits, costs get really wacky so the Bayerns don't have great data.

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

the point is to control the sea in and around Brazil and the eastern coast of Africa, which is still very important to the British empire. you don't need to threaten the imperial homeland to be a tremendous inconvenience for your global imperial adversaries.

as an example, neither the Italians nor the Japanese had friendly ashore basis all over the world, and the British spent a lot of time and effort war planning and matching effort in theater.

edit: I don't think you realize how the RN thought about its obligations and commitments - it's a global force with global problems. it's intended to defend a far flung empire based on maritime trade, not to just defend the Home Islands (which it also has to do)

KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:

the British (and other naval powers) were paranoid about straw purchasing of warships (they thought for a while that the South American dreadnought race was some kind of weird trick by An Unknown Power to acquire more dreadnoughts in secret)

Wikipedia posted:

Various British papers speculated that either the Germans, Japanese, or Americans were actually buying the ships, while naval experts in Germany thought the Americans, British, or Japanese were going to take them over.[22][50][51][52] On the other side of the Atlantic, some American papers theorized that the ships would be sold to the United Kingdom, Germany, or Japan.[53][54][55]

BalloonFish posted:

Leading to one of my favourite Wiki paragraphs:

ChubbyChecker posted:

Cox and Danks Ltd is a drat fine name for a company.

feedmegin posted:

Sure. I'm not saying it's NO concern, of course it is (though note I'm also not suggesting that e.g. Brazil get flogged the entirety of the High Seas Fleet, either). I'm saying it's rather less of a possible existential threat than e.g. France getting its hands on a bunch of them (or as mentioned, yeah, Italy).

Comstar posted:

What were Russian ships doing with an IJN flag on board?

Surly someone's written Napoleon in South America or Napoleon in North America. Maybe he convinces congress he can take Canadia this time! It's not like Europe would really care, and the UK can't really spend money on allies this time. I guess Wellington can form an army to deploy to Mexico and have even MORE fun with Spanish Speaking Allies. Wellington goes on to release the slaves in the South?


Someone send Harry Turtledove a tweet please. I want to read that book.

Alchenar posted:

Also it was assumed to take two years to gear up manufacturing and produce the war material necessary to defeat Germany on the ground, as well as train up the divisions that would do the work.

By 1938 it is the correct war plan because it is the only viable option. I disagree that planners were complacent about the fall of Poland, plently of contemporary accounts from British and French army officers make it plain that they know they aren't 'fighting fit' and the Germans are and that this is a massive problem for them. You probably have to go all the way back to 1933 and have Britain/France match German rearmament step-for-step for a different plan to make sense.

VostokProgram posted:

IIRC Jodl said that during the invasion of Poland the Germans had very few divisions on the west and that if the French had attacked they would have won. Was that a load of bull?

PeterCat posted:

Speaking of alternative histories, last night I watched Hallmark's "The court-martial of George Armstrong Custer," which was made in the mid 70s and based on an alternative history novel where Custer survives the Little Big Horn and is court martialed. The movie seems to think that criticism of Custer is just scapegoating to shift the blame and gives him a pass because none of those in judgement were there and could understand that circumstances that led him to the battle.

At the end of the movie he is found not guilty and given the Medal of Honor.

Scratch Monkey posted:

Scratch Monkey posted:

The Lone Badger posted:

Does abandoning ship automatically imply surrender, or do the lifeboats need to go on to surrender?

PeterCat posted:

It's extremely weird to me that anyone would look at Custer and think "yeah, there's a guy to glorify."

I read the book The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick and one quote that stands out to me is Custer stating that "Indian women rape easy," referring to native women the Cavalry had captured.

I can't find the clip online, but Calamity Jane on Deadwood summed it up. "Custer was a oval office, the end."

Uncle Enzo posted:

No you can still resist but it's just suicide at that point. You're within your rights to pull out a pistol and shoot at the destroyer offering rescue.

Likewise, while I'm pretty sure the laws of the sea (don't ask which ones lol) clearly state you have to pick up survivors, that's been violated all over the place many many times either passing them by or machine gunning. If your ship is sunk you're pretty lucky to get offered rescue at all by anyone, period.

Vahakyla posted:

So, I need some of this thread's opinions.

At my college, we have a really neat professor who is a former IDF Officer, Iraqi-jew from Baghdad, and extremely accomplished on the field of diversity and inclusion in the jewish world, and a big israeli state critic and a scholar of all the different ways the state of Israel has been poo poo.
So, this kind of gives him jew-cred and progressive-cred.

...anyway I was in his zoom lecture about the Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht, as he also does cross-studies with the history department and he went on a bit of a tangent that struck me as weird. Namely, he discussed how significant parts of the Luftwaffe were actually "clean" as we understand in the war history sense. He discussed the proper treatment of black aviator prisoners at Stalag Lufts, the lack of participation in many einsatsgruppen activities, and pointed out critics such as Hans-Joachim Marseille. To specify this, he did emphasize that this is one the flying squadron and wing level, and not the same as on the organizational side of the big luftwaffe. He also pointed out a war criminal Alexander Andrae and the Crete war crimes, and Reich Air Ministry.

What gives? Is this a matter of "can't strafe jews with a Bf-109"? Is there some credit to this? It's not like I consider Göring to be some super cool guy in any way.

Memento posted:

In this same vein, that ice-strengthened cruiser that the Venezuelan patrol boat rammed, were they obliged to hang around and pick up the crew who had just embarked in lifeboats? Considering their nature as a civilian tourism ship, I can't imagine they had any significant arms on board, and considering the belligerence of the Venezuelans at the time, wouldn't picking them up be basically inviting a hostile, armed force onto your ship to be hijacked?

Vahakyla posted:

So, I need some of this thread's opinions.

At my college, we have a really neat professor who is a former IDF Officer, Iraqi-jew from Baghdad, and extremely accomplished on the field of diversity and inclusion in the jewish world, and a big israeli state critic and a scholar of all the different ways the state of Israel has been poo poo.
So, this kind of gives him jew-cred and progressive-cred.

...anyway I was in his zoom lecture about the Myth of the Clean Wehrmacht, as he also does cross-studies with the history department and he went on a bit of a tangent that struck me as weird. Namely, he discussed how significant parts of the Luftwaffe were actually "clean" as we understand in the war history sense. He discussed the proper treatment of black aviator prisoners at Stalag Lufts, the lack of participation in many einsatsgruppen activities, and pointed out critics such as Hans-Joachim Marseille. To specify this, he did emphasize that this is one the flying squadron and wing level, and not the same as on the organizational side of the big luftwaffe. He also pointed out a war criminal Alexander Andrae and the Crete war crimes, and Reich Air Ministry.

What gives? Is this a matter of "can't strafe jews with a Bf-109"? Is there some credit to this? It's not like I consider Göring to be some super cool guy in any way.

Xiahou Dun posted:

Not a historian, just some rear end in a top hat :

1) What are they a professor of?

2) Are you 100% sure you got all the nuance from what they were saying into the above post? I’m not trying to be lovely, but I’m right off the bat worried about this turning into a cross-discipline game of telephone. I don’t know this cat from Adam, but I’ve seen sooooo many instances of Scholar X makes perfectly reasonable point, Scholar Y hears X’s ideas summarized by a well-meaning source but information is lost, X and Y start disagreeing because of miscommunication.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Glorifying custer goes back to before he was dead. He was a young, dashing general who the papers liked to cover for basically those reasons, then he goes and gets himself killed and overnight becomes a tragic martyr, a young man cut down in his prime in a glorious last stand against waves of <insert 19th century racist bullshit here>.

Plus any unseemly poo poo that did make it into the general public discourse was quietly pushed under the rug as soon as it was easier to sell papers with poo poo like this:



That's basically an 1870s version of eagles crying over the twin towers.

Scratch Monkey posted:

Cyrano4747 posted:

I’ll also note that a lot of the luftwaffe fliers were die hard true believers. It was a prestige service and you had to be on board with the program to get into a cockpit. If someone wants to tell me that great grandpa Hans who was a mechanic and fuel pumper was an OK guy who never liked that funny mustache guy I’ll kinda shrug and say whatever, but great grandpa Oberleutnant Willi who got a few kills over Russia and then ended up a POW in N. Africa might have never personally marched anyone off to a camp but he sure as poo poo was towing the party line.

Cyrano4747 posted:

This is also broadly true for other totalitarian regimes. The combination of prestige service with the ability to just say "gently caress you all, I'm flying to England (or wherever)" means they really need to select for people who are invested in the system.

Vahakyla posted:

Okay, very fair. Director of Jewish studies, and a professor of Middle Eastern Studies. His research is mainly Sephardic and Mizrahi jews, and of the jewish refugees and early Israel. It's a weird interdisciplinary field with history and sociology and what not.

Memento posted:

She got her PhD Egyptology, then wrote a book about it, then went back to university to teach the next generation of Egyptologists. I told her it kinda sounds like a pyramid scheme.