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... how, in my twenty nine years of life, did I never notice those words were spelled differently
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Feb 12, 2022 08:58
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I am also having a "wait, what....?" moment about that 
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Feb 12, 2022 11:41
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Caveat: I'm working from half-remembered poo poo I read, a good portion of it written by posters here. I think the post-Pearl Harbor panic tended more towards "we need to kill every oriental-looking person" than "we need to negotiate".
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Feb 12, 2022 12:48
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Also it’s BerenSTAIN, not Berenstein Going back to a comment made on the previous page, how man kamikaze attacks were actually made on British/non-US ships in the pacific?
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Feb 12, 2022 13:39
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Well, poo poo. A big, interesting conversation about one of my particular areas of interest happened while I was asleep.  One of the things I'll add about Japanese carrier construction is that most Japanese carriers were designed with two hangar decks, and sometimes three. Typically, one above the ship's strength deck, and one down in the hull proper. On the one hand, this let Japanese carriers carry a lot of planes. On the other hand, it also drastically complicated ship construction: that's a lot of weight and empty space getting oddly distributed through the ship, and multiple hangar decks also mean multiple elevators, which are major structural weak points and prone to mechanical failure, so you typically want to keep them as few and small as possible. The Japanese use of closed hangars was in part a reaction to the design constraints imposed by this arrangement: all that 'ship stuff' has got to be somewhere, and if a huge volume of the ship's guts is dedicated to hangars, then it makes sense to keep those hangars in the middle of the ship for stability and seakeeping reasons, then clustering the ship stuff around the hangars. American and British carriers did not have this problem, because they did not typically (I believe there were one or two exceptions) build ships with multiple hangar decks. Another problem this multiple hangar deck design introduced was that Japanese carriers were typically slower to fit, deck, and launch aircraft than their counterparts because there's that much more vertical travel on the ship's elevators, and the elevators can only carry so much at a time - and can only move in one direction at a time. This design did let Japanese carriers carry a lot more aircraft than British closed-hangar designs, but also meant that Japanese carriers simply could not afford much in the way of armor. They tended to be very top-heavy designs, and especially the older ships like Akagi were known for their poor seakeeping in rough weather. Later designs like Soryu had much lighter construction across the board, making them far faster and better at seakeeping than the older ships, but also much more vulnerable to damage.
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Feb 12, 2022 14:57
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This is incredibly broad and vague question ; Did the fact that the US had to fight the Japanese in WW2 have any effect on how their conflict in Korea (and Vietnam) played out in terms of how they dehumanized the Korean and Vietnamese people, or were people already racist enough towards asian people that it really didn't matter how much they made out japanese people to be subhumans?
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Feb 12, 2022 14:58
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Greggster posted:This is incredibly broad and vague question ; Did the fact that the US had to fight the Japanese in WW2 have any effect on how their conflict in Korea (and Vietnam) played out in terms of how they dehumanized the Korean and Vietnamese people, or were people already racist enough towards asian people that it really didn't matter how much they made out japanese people to be subhumans? I think everyone dehumanized their enemy when they want to go to war with them. It's sorta a requirement.
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Feb 12, 2022 15:07
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Greggster posted:This is incredibly broad and vague question ; Did the fact that the US had to fight the Japanese in WW2 have any effect on how their conflict in Korea (and Vietnam) played out in terms of how they dehumanized the Korean and Vietnamese people, or were people already racist enough towards asian people that it really didn't matter how much they made out japanese people to be subhumans? They were super racist towards asian people already long before WW2.
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Feb 12, 2022 15:23
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If the question “was the US bigoted against it’s enemies when it went to war” the answer is “yes”
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Feb 12, 2022 15:26
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I don't think it's helpful to genericise it. There's no German Exclusion Act of 1882.
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Feb 12, 2022 15:28
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Fangz posted:I don't think it's helpful to genericise it. There's no German Exclusion Act of 1882. None of this re: Germans either  Or from Vietnam that thing of wearing necklaces of human ears. The US was specifically racist against Asian people, not just 'everyone it fought', this should not be a huge surprise. As for kamikaze attacks on British ships - this is the British Pacific order of battle by the time kamikazes are doing their thing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Pacific_Fleet#Order_of_battle Unsurprisingly I suppose, people (especially Americans) tend to remember the American side of the war in the Pacific more than the British but that is not a small fleet by any means and they were operating off Okinawa just like the Americans were. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Feb 12, 2022 |
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Feb 12, 2022 16:36
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From a military standpoint, ingrained racism in the US (this applies to all of Europe as well) towards Asians had military consequences. For one, it was literally believed that Japanese pilots would be unable to effectively dog-fight or do bombing runs. A notion that was quickly debunked as swarms of Zeros, Bettys, and Aichi's laid waste to everything and anything the Allies had in the Pacific for the first six months of the war. Of course this lesson is seemingly forgotten again in Korea when the Chinese suddenly get involved, and again in Vietnam. Lesson, don't ever under-estimate your enemy!
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Feb 12, 2022 16:44
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American racism vs. asian people is a very specific topic that goes clear back to people freaking out about Chinese labor on the frontier and culminating in the Yellow Peril and Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. All the racist tropes you see about the Japanese during WW2, the Chinese/Koreans during the Korean War, and the Vietnamese during Vietnam were extremely well worn by that point. As an example:  I don't have a specific date on that (I googled it quickly and am lazy) but it's either the 1880s or maybe the 1870s. Point being that it's a solid sixty years before WW2 and all the racist tropes that you see in WW2 are already there and established. fake edit: here, just out of curiosity I googled "anti-japanese racist ww2 propaganda" and this was near the top and it's fundamentally the exact same loving image as the 1880s one:  (I swear I didn't have that lined up, finding those two basically identical images was completely happenstance lol) Bestial asian with exaggerated features waving a gun while burning poo poo and menacing a white woman who is either dead or passed out, with the clear implication that some hosed up sexual violence has either happened or is about to. Did the wars the US fought in Asia contribute to racist poo poo in the US? Absolutely, but it was all there long, long before and the wartime era propaganda was effective precisely because it drew on older tropes that everyone would be familiar with.
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Feb 12, 2022 17:06
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Solaris 2.0 posted:From a military standpoint, ingrained racism in the US (this applies to all of Europe as well) towards Asians had military consequences. There's an excellent Drachinifel video on the false idea that the A6M Zero was a copy of a western plane, which goes into detail of how western observers got it into their heads that the Japanese were culturally incapable of original thinking. So when US and British observers were faced with obviously original Japanese planes that were breaking air records they were obsessed with working out which bits they'd nicked from which western plane, without stopping to think "maybe they just...built and designed this plane themselves".
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Feb 12, 2022 17:09
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Milo and POTUS posted:would muskey barrels foul in predictable ways? Like if you've shot 15 times you know it'll generally carry to the left and can compensate for it. Or is it always just luck of the draw No, not really. It should be noted that with black powder weapons fouling tightens the bore, eventually making it difficult to impossible to fit another bullet in before you clean it. This was doubly true with rifled barrels. Rifles were a thing going all the mid-16th century, but they were mostly restricted to hunters and sometimes specialist sharpshooter units precisely because of how quickly fouling would make them unusable. Having to clean your gun every 5th shot isn't a big deal if you're hunting deer, it's much more of a problem when it's you and 2000 of your buddies in a firing line. The genius of the minie ball was that it had a hollow, conical base. Upon ignition hot gasses would push that hollow base outwards to engage the rifling, which meant that you could have a sub-caliber projectile expand to exactly bore size at firing. This meant that you could rifle your barrel and use a small enough bullet that even with relatively heavy fouling the soldier could hammer it down the barrel. as far as "fouling shots" go it's actually a subject of much debate among shooters today. Long story short if you have imperfections or problems in your barrel, and especially around the crown, it might even them out a little bit but there are two issues that are probably a bigger deal: 1) cold barrel vs. warm barrel. Guns shoot different from a cold barrel. It doesn't take many shots to warm it up, and if you're in a competition setting where you're going to be shooting strings of shots you probably want to get your barrel warm before you start shooting for groups. Meanwhile if you're in a hunting situation where you're going to be taking your shot from a cold barrel, you want to make sure your sighting-in shots are all from a cold barrel as well otherwise your POA/POI will be off. 2) bedding the action into the stock. Some people partially disassemble their guns to clean them, and in the process you're un-seating the metal from the bits that hold it. Less of an issue with something like an AR, huge issue with something like a Garand or your typical hunting rifle. Often it will take a couple of shots for the recoil to settle the action back into the stock. I've got a Garand that on the relatively rare occasion I take it completely apart will shoot like utter poo poo for the first clip or so before everything settles back into place. This problem can be alleviated by doing gunsmith poo poo to make a more secure, firmer bed for the action.
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Feb 12, 2022 17:20
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Cyrano4747 posted:Bestial asian with exaggerated features waving a gun while burning poo poo and menacing a white woman who is either dead or passed out, with the clear implication that some hosed up sexual violence has either happened or is about to. Now you're just ignoring that American poster artists just were obsessed with that kind of thing.     In contrast, French posters depicted their soldiers caressing lovely ladies   and the Brits drew posters of a hot lesbian couple sending the useless sausage-wavers away  Meanwhile in Canada... 
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Feb 12, 2022 18:15
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Nenonen posted:Now you're just ignoring that American poster artists just were obsessed with that kind of thing. This looks like some kind of early concept for a Marvel villain
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Feb 12, 2022 18:18
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MikeCrotch posted:There's an excellent Drachinifel video on the false idea that the A6M Zero was a copy of a western plane, which goes into detail of how western observers got it into their heads that the Japanese were culturally incapable of original thinking. So when US and British observers were faced with obviously original Japanese planes that were breaking air records they were obsessed with working out which bits they'd nicked from which western plane, without stopping to think "maybe they just...built and designed this plane themselves". The development of the Zero, and the Allied response to it, is worthy of it's own novel. For one, American's had a few years prior knowledge of it's capabilities dogfighting it over China - the famous "Flying Tigers". However these reports were dismissed, because, racism. Once Japanese aircraft, and just as importantly, their superbly trained airmen, were mowing down Allied planes in the Pacific, it quickly became a top priority for American intelligence to get their hands on a working Zero. They eventually did, with the infamous Akutan Zero. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akutan_Zero The knowledge gained from this Zero, and the experienced gained in dogfights by such legendary pilots as Jimmy Thach led to new tactics (such as the famous "Tach Weave") but also directly led to design choices for the best Allied fighter in the Pacific War - the F6F Hellcat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grumman_F6F_Hellcat Of course, it's not like the Japanese just sat on their heels. Their experience led them to create a fighter that could match, and in some cases surpass, the Hellcat - the N1K https://airandspace.si.edu/stories/editorial/kawanishi-n1k2-j-shiden-kai-george Problem is by 1944 when the N1K was deployed Japanese Industry had no hope of keeping up, and many of Japan's best airmen were dead. Still, in the hands of the few elite pilots the Japanese had left squadrons of N1K could be devastating to US Combat Patrols even in the late war period. Especially since those US combat patrols were at that point used to easily clearing the skies of outdated Zeros flown by Japanese rookie pilots with barely a dozen hours of flight time, so would not always be on guard when suddenly a group of N1K fighters piloted by airmen who knew what they were doing suddenly showed up.
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Feb 12, 2022 18:26
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I think I remember that in Saburo Sakai's memoirs; when he got his hands on a George despite having only one eye he was a terror albeit too little too late.
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Feb 12, 2022 18:42
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Solaris 2.0 posted:The development of the Zero, and the Allied response to it, is worthy of it's own novel. To nitpick, the Flying Tigers never encountered the Zero - they came up against the Ki43 Hayabusa, the "Oscar". Although the fighter the Tigers mostly encountered was the older Ki21 "Nate". However the two are very similar in appearance and even closer in character and performance, so the AVG pilots often genuinely reported that they had fought Zeros. In any case, the tactics the Tigers developed to counter the highly agile but lightly-built Japanese fighters was exactly the same as those later applied to fighting the Zero - mutually supporting combat elements, maintaining energy and never getting into a horizontal fight. These tactics had in turn been passed onto Chennault by the Chinese - he had translated copies of Chinese and Russian fighting instructions and flying manuals which already laid out the Japanese aircrafts' strengths and weaknesses and how best to meet them. Just before the AVG began combat operations he obtained a captured copy of an IJAAF operations manual All these lessons had to be rather laboriously reapplied when the AVG was disbanded and the USAAF took over in mid 1942.
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Feb 12, 2022 19:19
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Solaris 2.0 posted:From a military standpoint, ingrained racism in the US (this applies to all of Europe as well) towards Asians had military consequences. I know the answer for why they thought Japanese people couldn’t dog-fight is going to be weapons-level racist, but I’ll bite : why, specifically, did they think this? It’s going to be something super gross like their eyes won’t let them see peripheral movement or something, isn’t it?
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Feb 12, 2022 19:21
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Xiahou Dun posted:I know the answer for why they thought Japanese people couldn’t dog-fight is going to be weapons-level racist, but I’ll bite : why, specifically, did they think this? Squinty eyes aren’t good at focusing on things. No, really.
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Feb 12, 2022 19:23
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it's probably also worth remembering that the imperial Japanese had views on race that were every bit as repugnant as the nazis, and that led not only to war crimes on the scale of Nazis, but also making some stupendously bad strategic and political decisions.
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Feb 12, 2022 19:29
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history has taught me that all people are garbage everywhere and at every time military history has taught me that they also want to kill each other
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Feb 12, 2022 19:44
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Rasputin on the Ritz posted:Squinty eyes aren’t good at focusing on things. Some AVG pilots later noted that their recruiters assured them that the job would be a walkover - all Japanese pilots wore glasses and all Japanese people lacked inner ear balance, so they were terrible pilots.  They were also told that they would be flying against unescorted bombers in daylight, flying from airfields in upland China, out of enemy bombing range. When it turned out they were stationed at a muggy dirt strip with bamboo shacks in mid-Burma, and they were flying day and night against modern medium bombers with fighter escorts (flown by some of the best military pilots in the world who had just torn through the Chinese air force and the Soviet Volunteer Group) over the Burma Road and would probably be on the receiving end of regular bombing raids when the war started in earnest several of them immediately quit and went home.
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Feb 12, 2022 20:40
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Comstar posted:I think everyone dehumanized their enemy when they want to go to war with them. It's sorta a requirement. I think "requirement" is too strong. We have a rich literature of medieval knights talking about warfare and quite a lot of it treats their opponents with a great deal of respect (quite a lot doesn't but "requirement" is a stronger term than I think can be sustained). We also see that early modern military thinkers very much did not think that dehumanization was necessary for good soldiers, because a good soldier was a clockwork machine that marched and shot and reloaded as a series of robotic, unthinking movements.
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Feb 12, 2022 20:51
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Anti-Asian racism was a real and corrosive thing even if it took a different form from the primary racist tension that Americans are used to (White vs. Black). The main complicating factors in the cases of individual opinions in Western countries was probably that China (blatantly obviously) and many other east Asian countries had accomplished a lot of the same things as Europe to a degree which could not be denied; they had large cities, they had religions, they had old political units, they were clearly able to conduct modern industrial production. I remember hearing that one of the political grievances the Japanese ultranationalists were able to flog was how Japan was treated after WWI, where they in particular were not able to get things like a resolution that racial prejudice is bad and should be condemned (or at least that racism should not be construed to apply to Japanese), in large part thanks to Australia in particular fearing Japanese immigration. bewbies posted:it's probably also worth remembering that the imperial Japanese had views on race that were every bit as repugnant as the nazis, and that led not only to war crimes on the scale of Nazis, but also making some stupendously bad strategic and political decisions.
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Feb 12, 2022 20:58
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Tulip posted:We also see that early modern military thinkers very much did not think that dehumanization was necessary for good soldiers, because a good soldier was a clockwork machine that marched and shot and reloaded as a series of robotic, unthinking movements. Ah, but that's still dehumanization, it just isn't of the enemy! 
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Feb 12, 2022 21:00
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:Gonna quote my quick summary of open- versus closed-hangar carriers from Grey Hunter's second(?) War in the Pacific LP. One thing you missed with open vs closed flight decks is the weather. In the central Pacific you probably want an open deck to prevent the entire place turning into a sauna. In the Atlantic the windchill can turn the temperature from cold to frostbite territory so having a closed deck to keep the wind out and make your mechanics lives better. The cold can have a real impact on moral and speed of work. All in all you chose your design and take the disadvantages that go along with the advantages. British carriers were designed for fighting over an entire Empire but focused on Europe, American carriers designed for areas America would be fighting (mostly the Pacific).
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Feb 12, 2022 21:57
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Foxtrot_13 posted:One thing you missed with open vs closed flight decks is the weather. In the central Pacific you probably want an open deck to prevent the entire place turning into a sauna. In the Atlantic the windchill can turn the temperature from cold to frostbite territory so having a closed deck to keep the wind out and make your mechanics lives better. The cold can have a real impact on moral and speed of work. In that case, how are modern USN carriers designed, and are there places that carrier crew hate to go? Edit: Actually, unrelated question that came to mind: how are planes allocated to carrier pilots in WW2? Like, does a pilot get a specific airplane assigned to him, and is he allowed to customize it in any way? Or are planes considered interchangeable and you'll board whichever plane happens to be available and like it, especially if scrambling? If for whatever reason you lose your plane yet manage to survive and come back to the carrier, are you just allocated a new plane from reserves or will you have to wait for a replacement to get shipped in from your home base? For that matter, ARE reserve planes/pilots kept on board carriers, or do they just go one plane per pilot and wait on replacements to make up shortages of either? I realize different navies probably had different ways of approaching the problem, so anything will work but let's assume we're looking at primarily the IJN or USN. Tomn fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Feb 12, 2022 |
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Feb 12, 2022 22:49
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Tomn posted:In that case, how are modern USN carriers designed, and are there places that carrier crew hate to go? Modern carriers are uniformly closed-hangar designs, as it's much harder to CBRN-proof an open hangar. Tomn posted:Edit: The RN typically carried few reserve aircraft aboard its carriers. Instead, replacements would come from specialist aircraft repair ships based in rear areas. The USN and IJN carried a lot more reserve aircraft, mostly broken down to their component parts. This difference is part of the reason why British carriers carried fewer aircraft than American or Japanese ones; the British carried slightly fewer operational aircraft, but a lot fewer crated reserves. Fleet Air Arm squadrons had more pilots than they had aircraft, allowing for pilots to be rested and rotated (or to replace losses). As a pilot, you might have a preferred aircraft, but there was no guarantee that you'd be using it throughout.
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Feb 13, 2022 00:25
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Nenonen posted:
I think tree eating megafauna would have been a terrifying thing to be deployed in a war.
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Feb 13, 2022 00:46
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I feel like you could simultaneously dehumanize an opponent, on a wide scale but show respect, ie to an individual general or elite unit
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Feb 13, 2022 00:53
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Nessus posted:
Just to clarify on this point - the primary issue was the upon the formation of the League of Nations the Japanese (justifiably) wanted clauses about racial equality in the constitution. This was shot down by the British because admitting all races were equal posed some extremely awkward questions about the legal right of the British to govern their colonies, especially India. This was especially hurtful to the Japanese given Britain and Japan's close relation up until this point, though this had been dwindling as Japan was no longer relying on British naval expertise and the upcoming Washington naval treaty would explicitly forbid an Anglo-Japanese naval alliance.
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Feb 13, 2022 01:02
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MikeCrotch posted:Just to clarify on this point - the primary issue was the upon the formation of the League of Nations the Japanese (justifiably) wanted clauses about racial equality in the constitution. This was shot down by the British because admitting all races were equal posed some extremely awkward questions about the legal right of the British to govern their colonies, especially India. This was especially hurtful to the Japanese given Britain and Japan's close relation up until this point, though this had been dwindling as Japan was no longer relying on British naval expertise and the upcoming Washington naval treaty would explicitly forbid an Anglo-Japanese naval alliance. Then again, maybe not.
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Feb 13, 2022 02:45
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PeterCat posted:I think tree eating megafauna would have been a terrifying thing to be deployed in a war. the hedgerow-devouring rhino for example
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Feb 13, 2022 03:38
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Greggster posted:This is incredibly broad and vague question ; Did the fact that the US had to fight the Japanese in WW2 have any effect on how their conflict in Korea (and Vietnam) played out in terms of how they dehumanized the Korean and Vietnamese people, or were people already racist enough towards asian people that it really didn't matter how much they made out japanese people to be subhumans? If anything there's a sizable propaganda campaign in WWII to rehumanize Chinese (because they are, conveniently, now allies). There's a reasonably well known poster that purports to explain how to tell the difference (you'll never guess which one is presented as basically a normal human and which one is a bestial degenerate). Via WIki: 
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Feb 13, 2022 03:54
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FAUXTON posted:the hedgerow-devouring rhino for example  Good one!
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Feb 13, 2022 03:55
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Kind've an odd question, but did someone use surplus shells/drop tanks for bollards outside this shop?  
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Feb 13, 2022 07:41
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How did operational recon work in WW2, specifically in Europe and the Eastern Front? Between a general idea of 'the enemy force is occupying the region' and the tactical level of 'there's an AT gun hidden behind that building', how would you find out whether there was an enemy unit in this village or that town? I'm guessing air photo recon would have a part to play, but with ground-based recon is it literally just 'advance until contact'?
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Feb 13, 2022 10:41
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