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Cyrano4747 posted:Nah the straight white Hitler answer to Britain throwing in the towel is he still invaded the USSR and more likely than not we end up with Army Group Center surrendering to Zhukov in the charred ruins of Paris in September 1947. He does, but I'm unconvinced that the USSR wins a war against a Nazi Germany that doesnt have a West or South theatre to worry about, has free access to world markets for resources, and which isn't under time pressure to start a war in 1941. All while the USSR doesn't get any lend lease. E: I think the other big interesting question is if the European war ends in 1940, does Japan still think its a good idea to go with the Southern strategy in 1941? Alchenar fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Jan 24, 2022 |
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Jan 24, 2022 20:48
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Cyrano4747 posted:The doughty English trooper, famed for his brave sacrifices at Stalingrad, the destruction of Army Group Center, and eventually storming the Reichstag itself. The war was well and truly over when British troops met other British troops at the Elbe.
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Jan 24, 2022 20:56
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I've been trying to figure out why the Abrams is designated M1 and the bradley M2/M3 instead of following the M60 The M60 is called: Tank, Combat, Full Tracked: 105-mm Gun, M60 And the original Abrams is: Tank, Combat, Full-tracked, 105-mm gun, M1 Why did the number go back to 1?
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Jan 24, 2022 21:09
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VostokProgram posted:I've been trying to figure out why the Abrams is designated M1 and the bradley M2/M3 instead of following the M60 I blame the Babylonians
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Jan 24, 2022 21:16
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VostokProgram posted:I've been trying to figure out why the Abrams is designated M1 and the bradley M2/M3 instead of following the M60 Because of this:  That's the MBT-70, the "Main Battle Tank of the 70s!" It was intended to replace the M60. It wasn't a great design and ended up being dropped when it went way over budget. Going back to "-1" was political, intended to indicate that they were going back to a clean start. They weren't - there were a lot of lessons learned from the MBT-70 in the form of cautionary examples. But nonetheless that was the idea. Cessna fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Jan 24, 2022 |
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Jan 24, 2022 21:25
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Interesting that DoD officials and comic book editors have the same strategy regarding renumbers
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Jan 24, 2022 21:34
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VostokProgram posted:I've been trying to figure out why the Abrams is designated M1 and the bradley M2/M3 instead of following the M60 Because the bureaucrats in uniform in the Ordnance Department had a ready supply of good quality coke. Or Venus was in retrograde over Jupiter so going back to 1 was a good idea according to numerology. Or it seemed like a good idea at the time.
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Jan 24, 2022 21:47
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One would think the country that invented the Dewey decimal system would be better at numbering things
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Jan 24, 2022 22:12
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Tree Bucket posted:I blame the Babylonians this is good
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Jan 24, 2022 22:24
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Siivola posted:It was Hitler who declared war on the US. Adam Tooze has argued it was an ideologically driven decision, and as such would probably have happened regardless of UK's status. Hitler was waging war against an imagined Jewish conspiracy, and in his mind the States were that conspiracy's strongest base. In our world, yes, because he knew it was going to happen anyway, because Britain was still in the war. Why would he if he's at peace with Britain? There might be a showdown eventually but plenty of time to build up the Kriegsmarine first. Ideology is not the same as stupidity. Germany did not invade all and sundry the instant the Nazis gained power.
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Jan 24, 2022 22:35
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VostokProgram posted:One would think the country that invented the Dewey decimal system would be better at numbering things Just lol. There's also the M-1 Armored Car from the 1930s, the M-1 Garand rifle, the M-1 Garand's bayonet (designated the M-1 bayonet), the M-1 helmet, the M-1 mortar, the M-1 flamethrower, the M-1 8" howitzer, etc, etc.
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Jan 24, 2022 22:38
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Cessna posted:Just lol. Don’t forget the M1 Carbine and M1 Submachine Gun! For insane numbering schemes, some the Air Corps/Navy ones for aircraft are just  when you are first trying to learn some stuff.
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Jan 24, 2022 22:41
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fartknocker posted:For insane numbering schemes, some the Air Corps/Navy ones for aircraft are just Yeah I never got the inclusion of the manufacturer as part of the designation.
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Jan 24, 2022 22:45
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zoux posted:Interesting that DoD officials and comic book editors have the same strategy regarding renumbers We should all be glad it’s not called MBT : Origins - Phantom Ordinance or some poo poo like that.
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Jan 24, 2022 22:47
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VostokProgram posted:One would think the country that invented the Dewey decimal system would be better at numbering things It makes more sense when you remember the Dewey Decimal System has issues.
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Jan 24, 2022 22:49
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Xiahou Dun posted:We should all be glad it’s not called MBT : Origins - Phantom Ordinance or some poo poo like that. Be gladder they weren't putting out Abrams foil variant armors.
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Jan 24, 2022 22:53
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fartknocker posted:Don’t forget the M1 Carbine and M1 Submachine Gun! The aircraft numbering is extra hosed because in 1962 they unified the separate Navy and air force numbering and reset the numbers which is why we went from the f-100s back to f4. But then they used old numbering for the ah-64 and the f-117, decades later.
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Jan 24, 2022 23:03
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:this is good That took me a second but it's a solid reference
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Jan 25, 2022 00:28
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Memento posted:That took me a second but it's a solid reference Gotta love sexagesimal numbers.
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Jan 25, 2022 01:29
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zoux posted:Be gladder they weren't putting out Abrams foil variant armors. Yeah, wasn't it the Leopard 1 that had foil armor?
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Jan 25, 2022 01:36
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Xiahou Dun posted:We should all be glad it’s not called MBT : Origins - Phantom Ordinance or some poo poo like that. MBT : Origins MBT : Origins - Platinum Edition MBT : Origins - Modern Air Combat MBT : Origins - Modern Air Combat Founders' Pack MBT : Origins Two MBT : Origins Two Remastered MBT : OriginsOne MBT : OriginsOne Two
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Jan 25, 2022 03:54
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Don't forget to buy the TUSK DLC and gold ammo!
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Jan 25, 2022 04:42
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My mother has been working her way through several generations' worth of papers that nobody ever saw fit to dispose of, and while 99% of it has been trash (nobody wants your high school chemistry notes from the 1950's), there's been the occasional interesting piece. For example, evidently in WW1, before the USA joined the fight properly, there was an effort to send drivers over to France to drive ambulances, and one of my ancestors did just that. And he kept a journal. I'm not going to dump the entire text all at once, but here's the introduction (which is already a pretty sizable set of paragraphs):quote:First, a word about the American Ambulance itself for the benefit of any who may not know of the wonderful work this institution is carrying on in France. Furnished by the Government with the magnificent, but unfinished new school buildings situated in Neuilly, a mile from the fortifications of Paris, and commencing activities with a capacity for two hundred wounded, the Ambulance has grown until at the present time it accommodates almost a thousand. And the motor ambulance service, the finest in all Europe, had, up to the time of the author’s departure, transported from the various battle fronts to hospitals, almost two hundred thousand badly wounded soldiers. Engaged in the field and in Paris combined there are more than two hundred and fifty motor ambulances, and the demand is ever on the increase, both for cars and for drivers. The latter are volunteers, and the majority are young Americans of the highest type: college men, business men, men of leisure, all eager to serve in the cause of stricken France. They are often exposed to heavy shell fire, many times in doing a voluntary work, many times because their regular duties bring them within range of the big guns, and “blessed” American Ambulance drivers are by no means uncommon. And more than forty of these boys have been decorated for gallant conduct, receiving the coveted “Croix de Guerre”, while one many whose life was despaired of by the attendant surgeons, but who fortunately recovered, received the “Medaille Militaire.” There is another group of drivers to whom all credit is due for faithful, earnest service, although the world hears little or nothing about their work. They are the drivers on the Paris section who transport the wounded from the receiving station at La Chapelle to the various hospitals in and about Paris. They are in no danger, neither excitement nor “thrilling” experiences enter into their lives, and they have no opportunities to win recognition, glory or medals, but their work is hard, mean, and monotonous in a sense, and fully as important as the work done by the sections at the actual fighting front. I'll leave it to you to decide how much of this is self-aggrandizing. I never knew the man myself. But it's certainly interesting reading!
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Jan 25, 2022 05:39
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feedmegin posted:In our world, yes, because he knew it was going to happen anyway, because Britain was still in the war. Why would he if he's at peace with Britain? There might be a showdown eventually but plenty of time to build up the Kriegsmarine first. Edit: Hitler not declaring war on the US only makes sense to me on the off chance that FDR refuses to sell any aid whatsoever to Stalin and leaves continental Europe to hang. Siivola fucked around with this message at 06:59 on Jan 25, 2022 |
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Jan 25, 2022 06:19
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feedmegin posted:Everything I've heard about the Romans in any incarnation is that they're pretty cool with bringing the ol' ignis ferroque to anyone who opposes them and then enslaving anyone who survives, whether it's the Republic or the Empire. I mean look what happened to Carthage. Just a niggle type question, it's correct to call Republican Rome the Roman empire, isn't it? KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:pretty much all ancient powers were incredibly bloodthirsty and cruel by contemporary standards The ones we hear about anyway. Cyrano4747 posted:Nah the straight white Hitler answer to Britain throwing in the towel is he still invaded the USSR and more likely than not we end up with Army Group Center surrendering to Zhukov in the charred ruins of Paris in September 1947. Didn't it come up in this thread recently that iirc Kruschev said that Stalin said that they couldn't have won without the Americans?
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Jan 25, 2022 13:10
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Siivola posted:Because it was going to happen anyway and for whatever reason Hitler would not leave for tomorrow what he could piss away today. That just isn't true, though. Hitler could and did back down when he thought it was in his interest to do so - Austria in 1934 is an example, when Mussolini threatened war if Germany tried to annex it. I can fully believe he would not have instantly declared war on America, even if he might eventually intend to do so, when America offered no immediate threat (because Britain is neutral and even America isn't invading across the length of the Atlantic), when he could instead build up his forces, especially his navy, over a period of decades.
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Jan 25, 2022 14:00
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Weka posted:Didn't it come up in this thread recently that iirc Kruschev said that Stalin said that they couldn't have won without the Americans? That doesn't sound likely, Lend Lease was the main thing helping the USSR and only 2.1% of that arrived in 1941, which was the year in which victory in the East was decided.
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Jan 25, 2022 14:12
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Siivola posted:Okay, actually, it is kind of interesting to ponder what would happen without Churchill at the helm in 1940. Would the British government sue for peace after Dunkirk? Would Roosevelt agree to send massive amounts of aid to the UK if asked by someone other than his best bud? Would there be an Anglo-Soviet agreement? Would there be Lend-Lease to the Soviet Union? Lord Halifax was in support of a peace agreement with Germany, and there was some brokering whether Chamberlain, and therefore the Conservative Party, would support Churchill over Halifax in May 1940. That's the closest Britain came to quitting. With the UK out of the picture, Barbarossa might have happened on a different timetable, but that, I assume, would only have helped the Red Army to prepare better. Stalin's hope in '41 was to delay the start of the war for a year. Hitler had fairly concrete plans for a naval buildup, and the seizing of ports and airbases in French West Africa, in preparation for an inevitable war with America for world domination, but his first priority was control of Europe (and seizing vast colonies in Africa from France and Britain.) The war with America didn't necessarily have to happen in his lifetime, he imagined that might be left to his successor.
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Jan 25, 2022 14:51
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Gort posted:That doesn't sound likely, Lend Lease was the main thing helping the USSR and only 2.1% of that arrived in 1941, which was the year in which victory in the East was decided. There's a bit of room between "Not falling to the Nazis" and "Raising our flag above the Reichstag."
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Jan 25, 2022 14:55
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Gort posted:That doesn't sound likely, Lend Lease was the main thing helping the USSR and only 2.1% of that arrived in 1941, which was the year in which victory in the East was decided. Out of curiosity, 2.1% of what? Tonnage? Dollar value? Individual items counted as units? Total amount shipped over the entire course of the war? What was that in absolute terms?
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Jan 25, 2022 15:01
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Tomn posted:As it happens, Ex Urbe has a fantastic post about the influence of Beccaria on European ideas about torture and I can do no better than to link her here.. It’s a bit of a long read but well worth it, diving deep into the Enlightenment thinking of the time and how Becarria used it to argue against torture. That's a great read, but I also wanted to mention Friedrich Spee who pubished the Cautio Criminalis in 1631 during the German witch hunts and in the middle of the 30 Years War.
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Jan 25, 2022 15:02
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Weka posted:Didn't it come up in this thread recently that iirc Kruschev said that Stalin said that they couldn't have won without the Americans? quote:"I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in this war," Stalin said. "The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war." Khruschev also writes about this, but in the context of "therefore, Stalin sux". http://militera.lib.ru/memo/russian/khruschev1/28.html Fangz fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Jan 25, 2022 |
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Jan 25, 2022 15:35
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Tomn posted:Out of curiosity, 2.1% of what? Tonnage? Dollar value? Individual items counted as units? Total amount shipped over the entire course of the war? What was that in absolute terms? Tonnage during the war I suppose another point that's worth making is that a lot of early Lend-Lease to the USSR was British, too Taerkar posted:There's a bit of room between "Not falling to the Nazis" and "Raising our flag above the Reichstag." Fighting Germany to a standstill, you mean? I'm not sure that can happen given the UK's dominance at sea and the USSR's industrial production - either Germany wins early or they don't win. Gort fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Jan 25, 2022 |
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Jan 25, 2022 15:38
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feedmegin posted:That just isn't true, though. Hitler could and did back down when he thought it was in his interest to do so - Austria in 1934 is an example, when Mussolini threatened war if Germany tried to annex it. I can fully believe he would not have instantly declared war on America, even if he might eventually intend to do so, when America offered no immediate threat (because Britain is neutral and even America isn't invading across the length of the Atlantic), when he could instead build up his forces, especially his navy, over a period of decades. I'm just super baffled by Hitler's decision to just invite the US over, if they dare. In hindsight it seems like a gigantic unforced error, considering he's already hip deep in Barbarossa.
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Jan 25, 2022 16:09
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:My mother has been working her way through several generations' worth of papers that nobody ever saw fit to dispose of, and while 99% of it has been trash (nobody wants your high school chemistry notes from the 1950's), there's been the occasional interesting piece. For example, evidently in WW1, before the USA joined the fight properly, there was an effort to send drivers over to France to drive ambulances, and one of my ancestors did just that. And he kept a journal. I'm not going to dump the entire text all at once, but here's the introduction (which is already a pretty sizable set of paragraphs): I look forward to them commenting about that anti-semitic weirdo who just draws on helmets.
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Jan 25, 2022 16:17
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Siivola posted:Okay yeah, fair enough. US ships were already shooting it out with subs in the Atlantic, and it's pretty unlikely that the US would ally with Britain and the other colonial powers against Japan and just ignore the European war threatening those allies' existence. It certainly didn't do Hitler any good, but I don't think it changed much in the big picture.
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Jan 25, 2022 16:27
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There's many potential degrees to "the US stays out of it". There's a whole spectrum from "if there's just a big empty ocean where America is" to "if FDR is handing out poo poo-tons of (de facto) free stuff to anyone who's fighting the Nazis but the Nazis aren't allowed to intercept their cargo ships".
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Jan 25, 2022 16:48
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Gort posted:I'm not sure that can happen given the UK's dominance at sea and the USSR's industrial production - either Germany wins early or they don't win. Wasn't the assumption "peace with UK"? That is, no naval blockade and world markets are open to Germany. Siivola posted:Okay yeah, fair enough. As already stated in this thread, he did it probably because he expected the Japanese to reciprocate and declare war on the USSR. He was hoping that this would weaken them enough that he could beat them before the US geared up enough to have a real impact in the war. A second very important point that often gets overlooked is that US involvment in the WW2 did not start at Pearl Harbour. US Navy had taken over convoy protection for a substantial portion of the Atlantic, and American warships were sinking German submarines and being sunk by them. The US had made it abundantly clear which side they were in the war, and in many real ways were already fighting in it. They had just not officially joined in because of internal politics.
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Jan 25, 2022 17:24
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Re: popular Roman sentiment with regard to the extent or brutality of their conquests. Someone posted an excerpt from the "They make a desert and call it peace" speech from Tacitus, which is pretty much the gold standard of "Roman elite discomfort with the Roman Empire." For those not familiar, it's a speech written by Tacitus in his history of how cool his father-in-law was, put in the mouth of a Pictish leader fighting the Romans. An undercurrent of unease with the Empire runs through a lot of Roman literature. The Aeneid, for example, takes a very melancholy stance on the conquest of the Italians and their sublimation into Rome, and chooses to end with Aeneas driven by "furor" -- bad rage which was tied to warfare and conquest (iirc "furor impius" was bound in the Temple of Janus, only closed during times of peace (so closed like twice between the beginning of recorded history and the Principate)). It also has a very strong message of "boy these Carthaginians are decent people, not unlike the Trojan-Romans, it's a shame we're going to kill them all. So while that doesn't give much insight into what Gaius the Pleb felt about the razing of Carthage, literarily-minded Romans (and Italians!) certainly weren't 100% rah-rah for the imperial project.
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Jan 25, 2022 17:33
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It's been said multiple times but you really have to understand that Hitler considered the US as big, if not a bigger ideological threat and enemy to Germany than the USSR. It should also be noted that the Germans had timed their entire war effort and rearmament around "peaking" in 1939 and going to war immediately. Germany had huge problems with foreign credit reserves and a reliance on imports for many critical raw materials, and knew long term they would not be able to compete industrially with any of their major neighbours. The conquest of France and the low countries and aid from Sweden and the USSR bought them some time through seizing assets but they were always on a ticking clock, essentially because they had "spent" their national reserves to get a temporary advantage in 1939 exactly. As to why they did all this and declared war on the US despite clearly being in no position to do anything but get clowned on? Well, I wonder if anyone has written about how contradictory viewpoints held by fascists make them unable to properly judge their enemies. I'm sure it would be interesting if they did!
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Jan 25, 2022 17:40
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