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MikeC
Jul 19, 2004
BITCH ASS NARC

Cyrano4747 posted:

Note that most jet aircraft in the modern age are slinging cannon shells, which effectively are grenades as far as people on the ground are concerned.

Is it actually that bad? Are aircraft cannons setting their ammunition to explode before contact? I would have thought individual rounds would have buried themselves into the ground before getting set off.

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Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

MikeC posted:

Is it actually that bad? Are aircraft cannons setting their ammunition to explode before contact? I would have thought individual rounds would have buried themselves into the ground before getting set off.

There's a HE round for the A-10's main gun, the PGU-13/B. If you're rolling out to blow up tanks you're going to have AP in your ammo mix along with HE, but if you're taking off in Afghanistan to give ground support to infantry who are dealing with non-armored targets, that's what you're going to use. It just uses a standard M505 contact fuse. No idea on what the trigger time on it is, but it's similar to the fuses they use in guns that might see air-to-air work, so one would assume "pretty loving fast."

Probably still a lot more effective shooting at targets on/near hard packed ground than standing hip deep in mud.

pedro0930
Oct 15, 2012
By Vietnam there's more logical and advanced development of strafing in gunship like AC47 (and I guess attack helicopter) where they get an aircraft with very long loiter time and has altitude and armament that's much more tailored for CAS.

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
What would be the best airborne weapon for antipersonnel roles? A rocket containing frag bomblets?

Fangz
Jul 5, 2007

Oh I see! This must be the Bad Opinion Zone!
Maybe so, but even to the modern day, the USAF has an interest in buying prop planes with guns for the ground attack role. See e.g. the LAAR program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Attack/Armed_Reconnaissance

Robert Facepalmer
Jan 10, 2019


TooMuchAbstraction posted:

What would be the best airborne weapon for antipersonnel roles? A rocket containing frag bomblets?

Thermobarics would be a good choice. As long as it isn't too windy or rainy.

Xiahou Dun
Jul 16, 2009

We shall dive down through black abysses... and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.



TooMuchAbstraction posted:

What would be the best airborne weapon for antipersonnel roles? A rocket containing frag bomblets?

A swarm of drones with claymores duct-taped to them is pretty hard to beat in terms of cost.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



TooMuchAbstraction posted:

What would be the best airborne weapon for antipersonnel roles? A rocket containing frag bomblets?
Neutron bomb

TooMuchAbstraction
Oct 14, 2012

I spent four years making
Waves of Steel
Hell yes I'm going to turn my avatar into an ad for it.
Fun Shoe
I suppose I should have clarified that I was assuming mid-20th-century tech levels, so no fusion bombs or Death Stars or whatever

bob dobbs is dead
Oct 8, 2017

I love peeps
Nap Ghost
the first deployed neutron bombs were started early 60s, deployed mid 70s

Gnoman
Feb 12, 2014

Come, all you fair and tender maids
Who flourish in your pri-ime
Beware, take care, keep your garden fair
Let Gnoman steal your thy-y-me
Le-et Gnoman steal your thyme




Without jokes, the best non-nuclear weapon a plane can use against infantry is cluster bombs. Nothing else comes close on a per-weapon basis.

The Lone Badger
Sep 24, 2007

Do the hypothetical infantry have chemical-protection gear?

Nenonen
Oct 22, 2009

Mulla on aina kolkyt donaa taskussa

Cyrano4747 posted:

I was replying specifically to the part I quoted, where you said jets move too fast to strafe man sized targets.

And then you said yourself that it's not a man sized target that they strafe but 'a treeline'. If a B-17 drops a bomb on a city and it falls on a dog, should we determine that B-17 can hit dog sized targets?

Acebuckeye13
Nov 2, 2010

Against All Tyrants

Ultra Carp

Nenonen posted:

And then you said yourself that it's not a man sized target that they strafe but 'a treeline'. If a B-17 drops a bomb on a city and it falls on a dog, should we determine that B-17 can hit dog sized targets?

is the dog bigger than a pickle barrel?

Neophyte
Apr 23, 2006

perennially
Taco Defender
always wondered what happened to the Lazy Dogs, seems like like would be popular as a clusterbomb replacement these days, since they're totally safe on the ground (after they go through your torso). I guess the tungsten pellet alternative HIMARS warhead is a similar idea.

quote:

Lazy Dog projectiles could be dropped from almost any kind of flying vehicle. They could be hurled from buckets, dropped by hand, thrown in their small paper shipping bags, or placed in a Mark 44 cluster adaptor

lolling at the mental picture of a c-130 cargomaster yeeting buckets of lawn darts out of the ramp in midair

Fangz
Jul 5, 2007

Oh I see! This must be the Bad Opinion Zone!

Nenonen posted:

And then you said yourself that it's not a man sized target that they strafe but 'a treeline'. If a B-17 drops a bomb on a city and it falls on a dog, should we determine that B-17 can hit dog sized targets?

I don't really get why the answer isn't "yes" here. Shooting in the general area of a target and hoping to hit something is common to a whole bunch of current weapon systems.

Fangz fucked around with this message at 09:11 on Jul 7, 2023

Glah
Jun 21, 2005
Knowing the accuracy of a weapon system is important when you are calculating things like probabilities of hitting the target and how large the danger zones where the risk of injury is above acceptable levels are. For example how close you can call an artillery barrage to your own position.

If WW2 bombers had the accuracy to hit a dog sized target, there wouldn't have been a need to plan the bombing runs to saturate whole areas of city in order to hit the relevant industries and factory buildings.

Glah fucked around with this message at 09:24 on Jul 7, 2023

knox_harrington
Feb 18, 2011

Running no point.

Neophyte posted:

always wondered what happened to the Lazy Dogs, seems like like would be popular as a clusterbomb replacement these days, since they're totally safe on the ground (after they go through your torso). I guess the tungsten pellet alternative HIMARS warhead is a similar idea.

lolling at the mental picture of a c-130 cargomaster yeeting buckets of lawn darts out of the ramp in midair

In the early 2010s the British Army was stocking CRV7 flechette rockets for AH, 80 tungsten darts per rocket with 19 rockets per pod. I never saw it used and it was discontinued a few years ago.

Fangz
Jul 5, 2007

Oh I see! This must be the Bad Opinion Zone!

Glah posted:

Knowing the accuracy of a weapon system is important when you are calculating things like probabilities of hitting the target and how large the danger zones where the risk of injury is above acceptable levels are. For example how close you can call an artillery barrage to your own position.

If WW2 bombers had the accuracy to hit a dog sized target, there wouldn't have been a need to plan the bombing runs to saturate whole areas of city in order to hit the relevant industries and factory buildings.

Right, I don't want to give the impression that accuracy is irrelevant. Up until the advent of precision guided weapons, this is pretty much how all air attacks on ground targets really worked. If you want to argue that WWII bombers can't hit dogs, they also can't hit factories or workers houses. I don't see how shooting up a treeline to hit infantry in them is different from bombing a city to hit factories in it.

The original poster was supposing that not being able to pick out individual infantry from foliage would make strafing attacks rare, but the bomber example shows if anything the opposite effect. Because of the bombers lack of accuracy, they were deployed en masse.

Glah
Jun 21, 2005

Fangz posted:

Right, I don't want to give the impression that accuracy is irrelevant. Up until the advent of precision guided weapons, this is pretty much how all air attacks on ground targets really worked. If you want to argue that WWII bombers can't hit dogs, they also can't hit factories or workers houses. I don't see how shooting up a treeline to hit infantry in them is different from bombing a city to hit factories in it.

The original poster was supposing that not being able to pick out individual infantry from foliage would make strafing attacks rare, but the bomber example shows if anything the opposite effect. Because of the bombers lack of accuracy, they were deployed en masse.

I guess this is more of a semantics argument but I'm really saying that WW2 bombers couldn't hit a dog sized target and yes, I'm also arguing that they couldn't hit building sized targets like a factory building. But they could hit a city area sized target and saturate the poo poo out of it with bombs and that was the prevailing wisdom in WW2 city bombing.

And I'd also say that post WW2 jet fighters couldn't hit a man sized target. But they could hit a treeline sized target and saturate that with rockets/cannons/etc... so I don't think that strafing attacks themselves were rare. Maybe there' two lines of argumentation going on here?

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Glah posted:

I guess this is more of a semantics argument but I'm really saying that WW2 bombers couldn't hit a dog sized target and yes, I'm also arguing that they couldn't hit building sized targets like a factory building. But they could hit a city area sized target and saturate the poo poo out of it with bombs and that was the prevailing wisdom in WW2 city bombing.

And I'd also say that post WW2 jet fighters couldn't hit a man sized target. But they could hit a treeline sized target and saturate that with rockets/cannons/etc... so I don't think that strafing attacks themselves were rare. Maybe there' two lines of argumentation going on here?

If that's the argument you're making no airplane has ever been capable of hitting a man-sized target. It's not a "jets are too fast" issue.

For that matter, a lot of long distance ground based machine gun fire wouldn't quality as hitting a "man sized target" since they're used as an area of affect weapon, to create a beaten zone where anyone out there needs to take cover, rather than to engage a specific point target. This is also something normal rifles were used for going back to the 19th century.

This doesn't mean man-sized targets weren't the intended thing that airplanes were engaging. There is tons of evidence for airplanes using their guns to engage infantry going back pretty much as far as guns have been put on airplanes.

edit: This is like saying that WW2 bombers couldn't hit a factory-sized target. Accuracy is one part of the equation, if you don't have good enough accuracy to reliably hit a specific point target then you compensate for that with volume of fire, in the bomber example using a squadron of the things to make sure that the factory is in the basic area that gets pummeled. In the case of an airplane a shitload of MGs - or in the modern era a single rotary autocannon - is really loving good at tossing a lot of ordinance into an area at once, making it very uncomfortable for the point target you're trying to engage.

Hell this is true of air-to-air combat as well. Hitting another aircraft that is moving at many hundreds of miles per hour relative to you in weird directions is a MUCH harder problem to solve than hitting a stationary ground target, and while airplanes are bigger than men they're still really loving small for that kind of gunnery. The solution has always been to throw as much lead at the problem as possible and accept that only a fraction of your bullets are going to hit. This is why the first aviators started taking MGs up when they realized pistols and rifles weren't cutting it. Ca. WW2 you have two ways of solving this: throw up an absolute gently caress LOAD of lead (multiple wing-based MGs, like the 6-8 .50 cals that the US uses or the banks of wing-mounted rifle caliber MGs in early war British designs) or use cannon that, while slower firing, will make any single hit catastrophic (the German/Japanese/eventually British/very eventually Soviet solution). It's worth noting that the really heavy cannon - 30mm and up - were generally considered ill-suited for engaging fighters and existed more for anti-bomber work. The more recent solution to that is the rotary autocannon, which uses multiple rotating barrels to give you a rate of fire far in excess of what a single-barreled gun can do.

Either way, the core problem is "we have difficulty hitting this target with a single aimed shot" and the solution is "fire a whole fuckload of times, eventually something will be on target."

Glah
Jun 21, 2005

Cyrano4747 posted:

If that's the argument you're making no airplane has ever been capable of hitting a man-sized target. It's not a "jets are too fast" issue.

Today they absolutely are capable of it, or at least get very very close. Think of drones taking out some dude on a back seat of a car with one of those switchblade missiles going fast.

When I talked about post WW2 jets, I was just ruminating that faster jets, like from Korean War era, would have much harder time strafing effectively than slower planes. Better targeting systems etc removed the problem ofc.

quote:

Either way, the core problem is "we have difficulty hitting this target with a single aimed shot" and the solution is "fire a whole fuckload of times, eventually something will be on target."

Yeah, I think there's just been a misunderstanding here and people are talking past each other. I was giving my POV on how you can give a perfectly understandable "no" answer to a question about WW2 bombers being able to hit a dog sized target. What you said there was also the crux of my argument: targeting and accuracy is all about probabilities. More accurate you are, ie. smaller target you are able to hit with good probability, less led/explosives you need to send that way to achieve effect.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Glah posted:

When I talked about post WW2 jets, I was just ruminating that faster jets, like from Korean War era, would have much harder time strafing effectively than slower planes. Better targeting systems etc removed the problem ofc.

Yes, but the point remains that this wasn't a problem. Attacking a stationary (relative to airplane speeds at least - moving vehicles count as stationary for this) target on the ground is a fairly easy problem to solve relative to attacking a moving target in the air. The difference in closing speed between a ground target and a 400mph WW2 era fighter, a 500mph Korean-era jet, and a 600mph Vietnam-era jet* just isn't that big a difference. Hitting a Mig-15 from an F-86 is a way harder targeting problem than hitting some truck, train, or a bunch of soldiers.

Keep in mind that strafing runs aren't done nape of the earth with half-second trigger times. It's more of a shallow dive from altitude, where you have all the time in the world (excluding pressure from ground based return fire) to line up and attack.

This is setting aside the fact that there is tons of evidence for jets making ground attacks with guns from Korea to today.

here is some video of F-80s attacking ground targets in Korea, complete with gun cam footage. Notice how the attack profile is. This isn't some kind of super zoomy attack where you're going to be too fast to do anything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh2wqnRC5rc


*don't think I've ever heard of anyone doing ground attack super sonic

Glah
Jun 21, 2005
Ah yes, now I get what you mean, you just meant the starfing by 50's jets, not hitting a dog with Flying Fortress argument. And I had incorrect knowledge of how slow early jets could perform, there wouldn't be big difference between prop planes and them strafing. And those were very accurate hits on the video.

Cessna
Feb 20, 2013

KHABAHBLOOOM

Gents, there's gun camera film of F-86s strafing people on the ground in Korea:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VTnZeu7VGs

There are dozens of these videos on YouTube. I think it's safe to say that yes, early jets could strafe people on the ground.

Cessna fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Jul 7, 2023

Mandoric
Mar 15, 2003
Doing something to kill that particular dude right there is useless romanticism. I understand the cultural cachet especially in places where the early-modern military either remained organized on feudal lines and personal loyalty to that dude might be what's holding the enemy forces together, or where it was light militia and had to rely on inflicting psychologically rather than materially untenable losses, I understand the importance to morale in feeling personal agency (not as much relevant for jet pilots, but a huge thing re: whether infantrymen are allowed to fancy themselves sharpshooters in between magdumping at suspicious cover), but it's not what wins wars.

What wins wars is reducing the enemy capacity or will to resist faster than they can reduce your capacity or will to enforce, or vice-versa, and a strafing run is far more suited for that--x, even if a low x, casualties out of 100 men in the position whether or not they were the one aimed at (or even hit! Jerry spraining an ankle as he dives into the ditch is still not going to be on the line when his unit arrives in position), an immediate split from march formation and time spent on reorganization, and the psychological factors of encouraging safer-but-slower routes and putting the target under the stress of combat for longer periods.

Mandoric fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Jul 7, 2023

Carillon
May 9, 2014






My father was an F8/A7 pilot in Vietnam and he has told me stories about using his survey to strafe infantry. Mainly ot was like truck parks and things, but he also targeted infantry formations. So personal evidence that it did happen in Vietnam with jet technology

Cessna
Feb 20, 2013

KHABAHBLOOOM

Mandoric posted:

Doing something to kill that particular dude right there is useless romanticism.

From a strategic perspective, of course.

From the point of view of a rifleman, though, that's exactly what he's doing if he can. He's not thinking in terms of "I want to reduce the enemy's capacity or will to resist," he's thinking more along the lines of "just die already."

I've never been an F-86 pilot, but I suspect that if they're strafing enemy grunts they're thinking more like that rifleman. And, bluntly, that's what war IS for the overwhelming majority of combatants.

Cessna fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Jul 7, 2023

knox_harrington
Feb 18, 2011

Running no point.

Precision strike is absolutely transformational for warfare. Killing that dude / that tank right there is exactly what you want to do, because of the inverse square law. We are seeing it right now in Ukraine, dropping a $30 grenade on top of someone's head is an incredible effect vs spamming hundreds of rounds of artillery against a guy in a trench.

Fangz
Jul 5, 2007

Oh I see! This must be the Bad Opinion Zone!

Mandoric posted:

psychological factors of encouraging safer-but-slower routes and putting the target under the stress of combat for longer periods.

Yeah this is an underrated aspect. You get a bunch of accounts from German soldiers of enemy planes being everywhere and the Luftwaffe being apparently nowhere. Even if air power isn't inflicting heavy casualties, no one wants to be constantly watching the skies. Even if there's jungles to hide in, no one likes to constantly march through the drat things!

madeintaipei
Jul 13, 2012

Glah posted:

Ah yes, now I get what you mean, you just meant the starfing by 50's jets, not hitting a dog with Flying Fortress argument. And I had incorrect knowledge of how slow early jets could perform, there wouldn't be big difference between prop planes and them strafing. And those were very accurate hits on the video.

I mean, you do not want to be low and slow in an early jet like that, especially while carrying ordinance or fuel tanks. A lot of those jets responded to throttle inputs and accelerated slowly. Flaps and keeping the throttle up helps some, but you still wouldn't have the responsivness of, say, an F4U.

Putting the guns in the nose probably helped keep a tight concentration of fire compared to a prop plane with wing-mounted guns.

BalloonFish
Jun 30, 2013



Fun Shoe
I recently read about an incident involving the Royal Naval Division in the closing weeks of WW1 on the Western Front (by which time the unit was technically the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division of the Army). During the Hundred Days Offensive, between the crossing of the Saint-Quentin Canal and the Second Battle of Cambrai, the RND was tasked with the capture of the village of Niergnies, south of Cambrai. This it did, with a dawn attack launched at 4.30am, and four hours later the objective had been secured.

Then, at 09.10, the German forces counter attacked. According to the RND's war diary:

quote:

7 captured British Tanks emerged from the sunken road A.30.b. and encountered one of our Tanks about LA BELLE ETOILE which had run out of ammunition. One Tank was dealt with by a captured Anti-Tank Rifle by O/C Anson Battalion. One was dealt with by the O/C Hood Battalion using a captured German gun, two were dealt with by fire from our guns and another was knocked out by the Artillery using a captured German gun reversed. The two other Tanks escaped towards WAMBAIX.

In following up this account, I found it mentioned in H.W. Wilson's contemporary periodical The Great War - in which he calls the captured tanks first 'storming cars' and then 'perverted landships' (which would make a great username).

The royalnavaldivison.info website expands slightly on the details, confirming that the second tank was knocked out by a captured German field gun. A similar amount of detail is offered in Douglas Jerrold's 1923 history of the RND, and Winston Churchill mentions Niergnies in his introduction that book.

In searching for more info I also found a discussion on the Landships forum which said that the repulsed counter-attack at Niergnies was the second tank-on-tank engagement in history. That thread also threw up a quote from an officer's London Gazette entry for a bar to his Military Cross:

quote:

George Neville Bushman, Lt. Actg. Capt., Special Reserve attached to B Battery, 178th Brigade R.F.A.

On the morning of 8.October 1918 near Niergnies when our infantry were compelled by two enemy tanks and machine-gun fire to withdraw, this officer with one other officer and one N.C.O. turned a captured 77mm. gun into action. He went forward under heavy machine- gun fire to observe the fire and put both tanks out of action. He showed great gallantry and initiative.

Which, given the number of tanks (two rather than seven) and the units and people involved implies that later in the day (after the RND's action against the counter-attack) there was another case of a German gun being used against German tanks. Contributors to that thread quote another book saying that these tanks were also ex-British ones, and that Captain Bushman used the 77mm gun to take out a 'female' MkIV tank in German employ.

Are there any other instances (let's narrow it down to industrial-era warfare with recognisable 'issued equipment') where, in pitched battle, both sides have been fighting using equipment captured from the other? I'm thinking especially of battles on land, to discount the instances from the Age of Sail where it was not unknown for two ships captured from each side at another time to fight each other under their new respective colours.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

BalloonFish posted:



Are there any other instances (let's narrow it down to industrial-era warfare with recognisable 'issued equipment') where, in pitched battle, both sides have been fighting using equipment captured from the other? I'm thinking especially of battles on land, to discount the instances from the Age of Sail where it was not unknown for two ships captured from each side at another time to fight each other under their new respective colours.

Yeah, all the time. Back in the days of muskets and smooth bore cannon, cannon crews had more or less standing orders to "spike" their guns (literally hammer a metal spike into the touch hole) if they got overrun so that the enemy couldn't capture the guns and turn them around. There are plenty of examples of people going to great lengths to cut down the gun crews before they could accomplish this because, hey, now it's OUR cannon. Once in a while you'll see it used in that very battle, more frequently the guns just get rolled into the army and used in the next battle. A famous example are the cannons captured at Fort Ticonderoga being pulled overland to break the siege of Boston early in the Revolution.

During WW2 the Germans famously re-used all manner of captured guns. Tons of photographic evidence of German soldiers using captured Russian small arms in particular, plus they had a whole system for gathering that poo poo up and re-issuing it to rear-area troops. This isn't just a WW2 thing either, the Austrians did it a bunch during WW1.

This isn't mine (sadly) but it's a cool example of that. It's an Imperial Russian Mosin that was captured and re-issued by the Austro-Hungarians. That's what the AZF mark at the bottom of the pic is. After the war it was then sold to the Finns, who used it against the Russians (that's what the [SA] mark on the side is).



So yeah, tons of armies made use of captured arms.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

knox_harrington posted:

Precision strike is absolutely transformational for warfare. Killing that dude / that tank right there is exactly what you want to do, because of the inverse square law. We are seeing it right now in Ukraine, dropping a $30 grenade on top of someone's head is an incredible effect vs spamming hundreds of rounds of artillery against a guy in a trench.

Sure, but blanketing an area with HE also has its uses, especially when you're trying to deny use of an area or just gently caress up a big swath of dug-in troops.

See: Ukraine asking for (and receiving) cluster munitions.

Different tools for different problems. Sometimes you want to drop one grenade right in an MG nest, sometimes you want to say "gently caress your trench line."

Beardless
Aug 12, 2011

I am Centurion Titus Polonius. And the only trouble I've had is that nobody seem to realize that I'm their superior officer.
I've read that the US Army used captured German artillery starting in late 1944 in order to get around a shortage of 105mm shells, is there any truth to that? That could potentially lead to a situation where a US battery with German guns exchanged fire with a German battery equipped with Russian guns.

BalloonFish
Jun 30, 2013



Fun Shoe

Cyrano4747 posted:

Once in a while you'll see it used in that very battle, more frequently the guns just get rolled into the army and used in the next battle. A famous example are the cannons captured at Fort Ticonderoga being pulled overland to break the siege of Boston early in the Revolution.

...
So yeah, tons of armies made use of captured arms.

Thanks for the (good) info. I guess I was (without properly saying it) thinking more of cases like the bit in bold, rather than captured equipment being mopped up in the aftermath, taken into the supply chain, stamped, numbered and logged and then reissued, which I know is more common. In the Niergnies case the men in the field were using guns that the Germans had discarded only an hour or so before, although the ex-British tanks the Germans were using had presumably been captured at a longer timeframe.

And how common is it for that to happen on both sides simultaneously?

knox_harrington
Feb 18, 2011

Running no point.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Sure, but blanketing an area with HE also has its uses, especially when you're trying to deny use of an area or just gently caress up a big swath of dug-in troops.

See: Ukraine asking for (and receiving) cluster munitions.

Different tools for different problems. Sometimes you want to drop one grenade right in an MG nest, sometimes you want to say "gently caress your trench line."

Eh. I have done a lot of fire missions both in the sim and live, while you're vaguely right in the context of a fire plan or something, you are much much better off identifying the precise location of the target and hitting it directly. Which brings me back to the post I replied to, which I still don't agree with:

Mandoric posted:

Doing something to kill that particular dude right there is useless romanticism.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Beardless posted:

I've read that the US Army used captured German artillery starting in late 1944 in order to get around a shortage of 105mm shells, is there any truth to that? That could potentially lead to a situation where a US battery with German guns exchanged fire with a German battery equipped with Russian guns.
I wouldn't be shocked if it happened but the US Army probably didn't need to make a practice of it the way the Germans had to with a lot of the stuff they stole off conquered nations.

It's possible that such a situation would happen, but I think people would figure out who was firing at what. Nobody was going to go 'hey, that artillery shell was Russian! We gotta declare war on Stalin now!' -- though I am curious if there were policies for telling who was who when you had, say, British and American units fighting near each other but not necessarily in the same direct line of command. I imagine, for better or worse, the policy involved some tolerance for blue-on-blue.

Cyrano4747
Sep 25, 2006

Yes, I know I'm old, get off my fucking lawn so I can yell at these clouds.

Nessus posted:

I wouldn't be shocked if it happened but the US Army probably didn't need to make a practice of it the way the Germans had to with a lot of the stuff they stole off conquered nations.


The way the US fought wars in the 20th century (and honestly maybe only 1930-onwards) is a massive historical aberration. It's the bougiest of rich kid war. There just wasn't the need to use captured weapons outside of weird, immediate needs of guys in a sticky situation. So you're not going to see a concerted effort to organize and re-issue German rifles and tanks, but I'm also not going to discount some GI grabbing a grenade off a dead German's belt in a pinch.

That said, behind the lines you do see the ad-hoc use of poo poo that was just lying around, available, and maintainable. Jerry cans being the classic example, but you also see a fair number of light vehicles and other things that tend to operate behind the lines and don't get shot up too bad.

Here are a few captured Kubelwagens in use:





Here's a captured Opel Blitz:

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madeintaipei
Jul 13, 2012

BalloonFish posted:

Thanks for the (good) info. I guess I was (without properly saying it) thinking more of cases like the bit in bold, rather than captured equipment being mopped up in the aftermath, taken into the supply chain, stamped, numbered and logged and then reissued, which I know is more common. In the Niergnies case the men in the field were using guns that the Germans had discarded only an hour or so before, although the ex-British tanks the Germans were using had presumably been captured at a longer timeframe.

And how common is it for that to happen on both sides simultaneously?

Reasonably common, if we include the current War in Ukraine!

Capturing a machine gun to turn it against the enemy is a great way to surprise them and increase your own volume of fire.

If both sides are using the same or similar weaponry, or they both have weapons that stand above the enemy's, what you are asking is more far probable.

The Winter War and Continuation War provide a good example. The Finnish greatly preferred the Soviet DP light machine gun over their own Lahti-Saloranta, to the point of machine gun teams specifically hunting for Soviet light machine guns in battle. The Soviets, on the other hand, appreciated the Finnish Suomi SMG enough, with it's large magazine and high reliability, to lay aside their Mosins (if that is what they were issued).

There's a story (probably apocryphal) about two identically equipped, white-clad soldiers in Finland meeting in the middle of a firefight, sitting back to back while sharing mags and pointing out targets to each other until the battle moves on. One then turns to the other and asks, "У тебя есть сигареты?", whereupon they realize one is a Finn and one is a Russian.

The Yugoslav Wars are also a decent example. The Yugoslav military yanked as many weapons out of the constituent republics when they seceded as they could; sometimes taking them for themselves and sometimes dropping them off with forces friendly to the them. Bosnia-Herzegovina was particularly hard-hit by these actions, spending quite a bit of time and treasure to circumvent arms embargoes to arm themselves. Having been trained on AK/Zastava rifles, RPG-alikes, etc. they could easily use whatever small arms they were able to capture from FRY forces after small engagements or raids to build up their arsenal. Later, as they recieved Hungarian and Romanian arms built on the Soviet pattern, it was reasonably common to find a mixture of rifles, machine guns, and RPG-7-things in both Bosnian and dissident Serbian units.

The problems lie in training and parts availability, at least for regular forces. Most militaries are going to want their soldiers to use what is provided and what they trained them to use. Clearing malfunctions and maintaining a weapon can be matters of life and death. If both sides have similar equipment, then sure, why not use what you can find. Maybe consolidate and redistribute poo poo when units get pulled off the line.

A certain amount of training and familiarization can allow a soldier to use enemy weapons in specific circumstances, especially in very mobile units expected to operate behind enemy lines (SF now, paratroopers in WW2). That's going to be very common with guerrilla forces, down to the lowest level possible. A rocket launcher is better than no rocket launcher, in any case.

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