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Nessus posted:Wasn't this unironically true in the Russo-Japanese war? Yeah, the Japanese went way out of their way, in a way similar to what the US did for the Germans in WWII, in following the letter of international law and going above and beyond what was expected. The Japanese establishment saw it, along with the war itself, as a test to prove their place among the great powers. They did not extend this courtesy to Chinese and other Asian civilians involved in the sieges or battles. Japanese POW's were treated about as you'd expect in Imperial Russian captivity and had to go through military tribunals on return to Japan to judge their conduct during the war. It was not as severe as it was during WWII but it was still an ordeal. German POW's were also treated well after the Japanese took Qingdao in 1914.
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Sep 19, 2023 18:02
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feedmegin posted:And World War 1, as far as I understand it. WW2 Imperial Japan is not All Imperial Japan. Yeah, Japanese politics goes to poo poo in the 20s and 30s in some very specific ways that leads to some bad poo poo in the military. Basically it's like comparing the Imperial German army and the WW2 Wehrmacht. Don't get me wrong, the Kaiser's Heer did some loving awful stuff (Herero Genocide as an easy, low hanging fruit), but it's a very different situation and set of institutional norms and expectations than what you see during WW2.
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Sep 19, 2023 19:00
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Vahakyla posted:This dentist got the MOH for hopping in the machinegun and letting it rip. 9 out of 10 dentists agree
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Sep 19, 2023 19:02
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Some oceanagraphic something or other just did a dive at the Midway battlefield and got good footage of Yorktown but, more impressively, Akagi and Kaga. BBC video here, there's likely better video out there but I haven't bothered looking for it yet: https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-66850193
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Sep 20, 2023 13:34
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Wow. They even got the Imperial Chrysanthemum and everything. I'm looking forward to more pictures and videos coming out. I love this stuff. If it wouldn't mean being away from my family for months on end, I would 110% do oceanographic exploration for WWII wreckage like this all the time.
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Sep 20, 2023 16:01
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Chuck_D posted:Wow. They even got the Imperial Chrysanthemum and everything. I'm looking forward to more pictures and videos coming out. That was my 10 year old fantasy job. My general life plan at that time was to get fabulously wealthy somehow and then gently caress off on a restored PBY to find Pacific War shipwrecks. I don't think I had quite an understanding of just how loving deep some of them were, in my mind it was all Iron Bottom Sound.
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Sep 20, 2023 16:24
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Cyrano4747 posted:Some oceanagraphic something or other just did a dive at the Midway battlefield and got good footage of Yorktown but, more impressively, Akagi and Kaga. That would be the EV Nautilus team. They do general oceanographic stuff most of the time, but they've been exploring the Midway wrecks recently. I missed the live streams, but they have 25+ minute highlights.Here's their 10 minute overview video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9s6gGKrmBtQ I say they're a pro subscribe. I love putting on their live stream and watching people do deep sea science in realtime.
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Sep 20, 2023 16:38
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I've always been intrigued by how much the Japanese plan for their concurrent Midway and Aleutians operations looks like a prewar fleet exercise. The multitude of forces operating separately towards complex but interlinked objects specifically reminds me of US Navy Fleet Problems. Indeed, Fleet Problem XVI of 1935 involved a superior force from Hawaii attacking Midway while an inferior force stationed in Alaska attempted to defend Midway. Although the locations are nearly exact, the US Navy was obviously using US locations to roleplay attacking the Japanese Mandates and imagining Japan's defense of those islands. Still the planning, actions, and results look in many ways like what Yamamoto intended in his Midway plan. A major component of all fleet exercises was imagining and roleplaying the opposing force. One of the major themes often explored by the US Navy Fleet Problems was the difficulty of bringing to battle the inferior foe who, without a critical & vulnerable base threatened, often had little reason to engage the superior fleet. Naturally, the US Navy was exploring bringing the smaller Japanese fleet to battle or demonstrating the undesirable effect of dividing the US Fleet between multiple oceans. What would induce the enemy to action, and then in what ways might they act? Although I'm not familiar with the detail activity of Japanese Navy fleet exercises, I know they explored the reverse roles for most of the 20s and 30s. Unexpected Japanese success at the outset of the actual war and US global commitments in other theaters flipped the roles for the first six months of the war. Japan was struggling to bring an inferior US fleet to battle, and the US Navy was seeking to defend outlying bases and attrit the Japanese fleet. In many ways this isn't surprising in the context of 1941, but, regarding many of the prewar exercises, it means each navy had the opposite role than it had practiced before the war. Thus, if either navy fell back on prewar wargaming & exercise experience, they'd be basing their actual plans on the fake opposing force plans they had imagined. This could result in planning on an order of magnitude more unrealistic and complex than one's own prewar plans which usually had some basis in one's own goals and resources. If any of the above is true, it could explain Yamamoto's plan not merely as hubris or an issue specific to Japanese planning. It could be that the Midway plan was a mess because it was the Japanese Navy cosplaying as the US Navy. Were I a better scholar of the Japanese Navy, I would explore: 1. the prewar Japanese fleet exercises for similarities to the Midway plan, 2. Yamamoto's own roles and actions within those fleet exercises, and 3. Yamamoto's activity as naval attache in Washington to explore what opportunities he had to listen or investigate the US Fleet Problems and other exercises. Anyone can explore the records of the US Navy's Fleet Problems because the National Archives has digitized the series. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/176561618 The US Naval War College also published a free book on the US Navy Fleet Problems. https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/usnwc-historical-monographs/18/ An extra item to ponder, if the above has any merit, would be to look if any other operations in history with plans functionally based on OpFor planning experience - not own doctrine - went either incredibly well or equally as poorly as Midway. ---- This post feels as good as any to share my two favorite exceedingly false conspiracy theories about the Battle of Midway: 1. The chaos of rearming of the Kido Butai's second wave was a myth - in this conspiracy theory the Kido Butai's second wave had been armed with bombs to attack Midway at the same time as first wave had been on the morning of 4 June. The assumption is Nagumo et al were fully insubordinate to Yamamoto's instruction to retain half the Kido Butai's striking power in reserve in case of unexpected US carriers. The theory believes that they did not even wait for the first strike to report the necessity of a second strike before arming the reserve planes to attack Midway. The theory is meant to answer the question of why the Japanese were unable to rearm and launch their naval strike against the US carriers before the Japanese carriers were sunk. Any belief that the Japanese could launch a strike before being themselves sunk relies upon some amount of the second strike having been armed with torpedoes and remaining armed with torpedoes by the time the order was given to rearm the second strike to attack the US carriers. Entire chapters of Midway histories are focused on exploring when rearming orders were given, how many planes were rearmed, and even down to how many torpedo carts or tools were available to posit the status of the second strike at any given hour. However, this theory entirely sidesteps the issue as there is zero question that the entire second strike could be armed with torpedoes in time had they been all armed with bombs. This theory relies completely upon the belief that the first strike's radio message recommending a second strike was pro forma and that the timing of the rearming order was a complete fudging of the record to conceal when it was actually given. The theory utterly falls apart because some amount of the hundreds of Japanese officers and crew involved would have spoken and revealed that arming of both strikes' planes occurred at the same time that morning. 2. Yamamoto delayed the implementation of the new JN-25c codes specifically to allow the US to read Japanese coded messages - in this conspiracy theory Yamamoto deliberately allowed the opportunity for the US to discover and decode the Midway plan specifically to entice the US Navy to action. The theory is meant to answer the question of why Yamamoto expected the US Navy to rise to the obvious bait of Midway. As mentioned regarding prewar fleet exercises, a common problem was how to ensure that a battle would occur with an inferior foe at the superior fleet's choice of time and place. By providing the US Navy with an intelligence coup, the Americans might believe they had an incomparable opportunity to surprise the Japanese. This theory relies completely upon the belief that the senior operational leader of a navy can believe that "If I know that you know my plan, I have the supreme advantage." This especially falls apart because the only way to truly take advantage of such a situation is to have all key subordinates aware of and understanding their true role in the secret plan and not just their role in the overt plan. Then this theory again falls utterly apart because, like all conspiracies, someone would have spoken.
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Sep 20, 2023 23:41
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I’ll return to my shtick of posting tables. This day’s table is an expansion of a Vincent P O’Hara table in his Operation Torch (2016). He published a tabulation of damage events during the surface action of the Naval Battle of Casablanca. To this table I added in the concurrent air and sub actions of the battle. Included are some status lines to make some major events pop.  Air actions nearly doubled the table. Besides the battle being a fairly unique surface action, the immense size of my table makes it obvious why a more complete table wasn’t published. What even my table still doesn’t express is the details of the damage inflicted. Most notably, the air attacks wounded the French 2nd Light Squadron’s commander, wounded a division commander, killed a destroyer’s captain, and killed another destroyer’s executive officer. Strafing directly resulted in command devolving in one division of two destroyers to the executive officer of the second destroyer, Boulonnais. Although strafing never caused any severe structural damage, strafing caused critical casualties and chaos that prevented the French from performing decisively. Even with air and sub actions added, the Massachusetts is the most decisive participant. It disabled Jean Bart before the pitched battle. The lack of Jean Bart in action limited the available heavy gun support for the 2nd Light Squadron. Then the Massachusetts sank one French destroyer, the Fouguex. When Fouguex sank, it was not just the first significant hit upon the French squadron, but it can be seen as the point where what had been an indecisive skirmish turned against the French. At that point the battle had raged without a shell hit for 66 minutes. Massachusetts then had only one more hit but it knocked out the large destroyer, Milan. Granted, Massachusetts subsequent maneuvering away ultimately stretched the battle for another 104 minutes. Collectively, the US cruisers were critical to blocking and containing the French squadron. Although twice they left opportunities for the French squadron to attack the Fedala beachhead, the cruisers sank one destroyer, knocked out another, and drove the rest of the squadron back to the Casablanca roadstead. Their contributions are readily visible in the table. What the addition of the air actions provides is a greater clue as to why the French squadron did not push into the transport area off Fedala and wreak havoc before the full weight of US heavy surface units could interfere. Before any shells were fired, all four vessels in the 2nd Light Squadron’s two leading divisions had been strafed by F4F Wildcats. Just minutes before the action opened, the commanders, bridge, and signal crews were dead or wounded on the lead vessels. Although the physical damage to the vessels was mostly minor there were a few vital hits that damaged tiller control, damaged directors, and even started a fire in one store of ready ammunition. Then within 18 minutes of action opening, the Wildcats finished strafing all but one of the French vessels. Thereafter, three waves of SBD Dauntless divebombers delivered the only telling damage to L’Alcyon and knocked out the remaining three vessels of the French squadron. It is always correct to belabor that the Wildcats did not directly turn back the French squadron, as the pilots themselves claim. Augusta and the transports’ destroyers were the obstacles which turned back the French squadron. I believe the table shows that the Wildcats were simply the factor that dissuaded the 2nd Light Squadron from ganging up on Augusta and pushing their attack fully into the transport area off Fedala. Uniquely, the French submarine attacks are included despite all of them missing. They’ve were added to show when and how they could have affected the battle were their attacks more successful. Had all three attacks hit their targets Massachusetts, Brooklyn and Tuscaloosa could have been knocked out of the fight before several critical blows those ships dealt to the French squadron. Removing a battleship and two cruisers would have reduced the opposing US heavy forces to just two uncoordinated cruisers at a time when the French light cruiser was yet undamaged and supported by five destroyers. Incidentally, the Ranger Air Group also killed the captain of Le Tonnant before that submarine sortied from Casablanca harbor. The very same submarine attempted a torpedo attack on Ranger two days later, but the torpedoes missed. Who knows if those torpedoes would not have missed had Le Tonnant been commanded by its captain rather than its executive officer.
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Sep 22, 2023 16:44
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Seems like the right place to ask: I know NOTHING about the struggles. Ireland just beat South Africa in a pool game of the Rugby World Cup, which is being hosted in France. There were significantly more Irish fans in the stadium (stade de france) I guess due to geographical tyranny There was a song that went up among the (majority) Ireland supporters that I heard titled "Fields of Athenree" with a curious caveat from them commentary team. They were surprised cos it seemed to indicate a unified crowd? Is that so iconic it transcenrds the old barriers? Ireland won (spoiler alert) and the song that played was The Cranberries "Zombie" but the stadium PA dropped out on the chorus and boy did the crowd filll in! I know the song is iconic but the crowd absolutley took over. Is that so iconic it transcenrds the old barriers?
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Sep 23, 2023 22:30
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slothrop posted:Seems like the right place to ask: The only people on the other side of the barrier is in northern ireland, no one in the republic
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Sep 24, 2023 00:37
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slothrop posted:Seems like the right place to ask: ...why did this seem the right place to ask?
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Sep 24, 2023 12:07
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feedmegin posted:...why did this seem the right place to ask? I guess the troubles is sort of military history. Lions led by donkeys covered it, so that is good enough for me. Not my area at all but at least Fields of Athenry is familiar - it was adopted by Irish sports fans and is one of the more popular "Irish" tunes known worldwide as a result. Hell, Dropkick Murphys cover it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fields_of_Athenry I make no claims to whether this song is widely loved by ALL Irish (unionists included etc) but it's at least known by association. OK that's all I got.
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Sep 24, 2023 12:30
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Isn't The Fields of Athenry specifically a song about "the English are loving bastards"? Hence adoption by the irish republicans.
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Sep 25, 2023 01:08
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The Lone Badger posted:Isn't The Fields of Athenry specifically a song about "the English are loving bastards"? Hence adoption by the irish republicans. Yeah, it's about a dude getting hosed by the British for stealing food to feed his family during the Famine.
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Sep 25, 2023 01:25
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It took off first as a sports song with Galway GAA supporters in the '80s, presumably just because it's not that hard to sing and Athenry is in Galway, went to soccer in Italia '90 (maybe it was there at Euro 88 but I don't remember noticing it) and from there it just spread everywhere.
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Sep 25, 2023 06:47
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The Lone Badger posted:Isn't The Fields of Athenry specifically a song about "the English are loving bastards"? Hence adoption by the irish republicans. Many Irish songs are about how the English are bastards. Ranging from sad ones to several fight songs. Yes, obviously the Scottish are similar. And just to combine my dumb amateur music history posts. Are you any of you familiar with the Austro-Hungarian march, Under the Double Eagle (Unter dem Doppeladler)? Written by J. F. Wagner (no relation*), in the late 19th century so that young men could listen to it in between getting shot at in the name of a complicated monarchy. Like, that double eagle. It somehow is in common rotation in Western Swing of all things, and also as a bluegrass tune. I bumped into it the other day and thought I was losing my mind. I kind of love it. *although I did not check very hard
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Sep 25, 2023 06:58
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The other important thing to note is that the Irish rugby team includes players from both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
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Sep 25, 2023 07:04
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Does anyone know any good books about the conflict between the Navy and Army in Imperial Japan. I see a lot of references to it, but was wondering if there was anything in depth to read.
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Sep 25, 2023 08:44
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Josef bugman posted:Does anyone know any good books about the conflict between the Navy and Army in Imperial Japan. I see a lot of references to it, but was wondering if there was anything in depth to read. Yes.
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Sep 25, 2023 08:47
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Xiahou Dun posted:Many Irish songs are about how the English are bastards. Ranging from sad ones to several fight songs. Oh if we're doing weird A-H music poo poo, can't skip Hayden's banger "Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser." Hayden wrote it to be the personal anthem of Emperor Francis II, and eventually it just became a kind of Habsburg anthem. Lyrics were the basic "God save our good emperor Francis, may laural branches bloom for him." kind of stuff. Everyone loved the tune, so it got used in all sorts of other stuff! Hymns in particular, you'll hear "Glorious things of Thee are spoken" to this day. Some colleges too. It's the alma mater of Columbia University ("Stand, Columbia") and the University of Pittsburgh. But it became more famous when a bunch of German nationalists married the poetry of a dude named von Fallersleben to it. That became Das Lied der Deutschen. You know, the one that goes " Deutschland, Deutschland über alles." I will never, EVER not laugh when I hear University of Pittsburgh people sing their song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXJCxm7x9xg edit: also the least threatening bunch of people wearing uniforms and funny hats you'll ever hear that tune come out of.
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Sep 25, 2023 16:02
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Josef bugman posted:Does anyone know any good books about the conflict between the Navy and Army in Imperial Japan. I see a lot of references to it, but was wondering if there was anything in depth to read. Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy has a reasonable whack on it.
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Sep 25, 2023 17:17
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Ive racked up a lot of unused audible credits and will be riding a lot of planes/trains/buses soon. Anybody got any good milhist picks? I’m mainly on a sailing boats and steppe nomads kick atm but I’ll take any period. Ideally leaning towards entertaining but diligent/recent enough to not be complete horseshit
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Sep 25, 2023 23:41
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Ive racked up a lot of unused audible credits and will be riding a lot of planes/trains/buses soon. Anybody got any good milhist picks? I’m mainly on a sailing boats and steppe nomads kick atm but I’ll take any period. https://www.harvard.com/book/empire...20civilization. You probably already have heard of it, and I only did because of Dan Carlin extra episode, but this just came out about steppe nomads.
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Sep 25, 2023 23:54
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Ive racked up a lot of unused audible credits and will be riding a lot of planes/trains/buses soon. Anybody got any good milhist picks? I’m mainly on a sailing boats and steppe nomads kick atm but I’ll take any period. Japanese Destroyer Captain
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Sep 26, 2023 00:06
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Dreadnought and Castles of Steel by Robert Massie?
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Sep 26, 2023 00:11
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The Guadalcanal series by Jeffrey Cox is a pretty great, detailed, and recent series. Spearhead or A Higher Call by Adam Makos are easy listens. Thunder Below by Eugene Fluckey is an annual listen for me.
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Sep 26, 2023 01:58
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Vorkosigan posted:Dreadnought and Castles of Steel by Robert Massie? Castles of Steel being much more approachable. Seconding Japanese Destroyer Captain and adding Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors.
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Sep 26, 2023 04:15
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Anything by Ian Toll. If you’re into sailing ships, Six Frigates is as good as history gets. His Pacific Theater trilogy is also really good, but there’s a lot more works on the Pacific than the early US Navy.
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Sep 26, 2023 06:43
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Biffmotron posted:Anything by Ian Toll. If you’re into sailing ships, Six Frigates is as good as history gets. His Pacific Theater trilogy is also really good, but there’s a lot more works on the Pacific than the early US Navy. Six Frigates is simultaneously one of the best introductions to early American politics and one of the best introductions to Naval history that there is. Plus it does a pretty solid job of explaining how the USN came to be. A friend recommended it to me as a good "how do I boat history?" kind of book when I needed something along those lines, and I was just blown away at how it could also work that way for figuring out what the gently caress Jefferson et al were sparring about in the first decades of the US. edit: the one downside is that it will instill in you what I can only describe as an almost primal, migratory instinct to go see USS Constitution. Like, you're going to end up in Boston eventually. So take that into account, it could be pretty inconvenient if you don't want to go to Boston. edit 2: it's the ketching scene that does it. Just good goddamn. Cyrano4747 fucked around with this message at 14:18 on Sep 26, 2023 |
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Sep 26, 2023 14:15
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Just go with it and visit Boston. Go on board Constitution and process the reality that men sailed that thing around the world.
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Sep 26, 2023 15:41
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There was a very silly naval combat trading game thing that got briefly popular when I was in college. You got boosters of things the size of a credit card that you’d punch out and assemble into the shape of a sailboat with special boat stats and you make your boats fight. Great time waster in a college library. Week 3 or so the popularity, I got the USS Constitution and it was loving bum-jumped broken. For “”””realism”””” they gave it this special saving throw power to simulate its superior construction where it could only be damaged if you rolled something after it got hit. So I combined it with a boat that let you modify that roll so it could never, ever fail the roll and another boat that let nearby boats share magic boat powers. Suddenly I have three literally invincible boats in a game with ramming. I think that got errated in a split second but we’d already moved on. That boat game was hilarious.
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Sep 26, 2023 16:45
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I loved that game!
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Sep 26, 2023 16:53
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Xiahou Dun posted:There was a very silly naval combat trading game thing that got briefly popular when I was in college. You got boosters of things the size of a credit card that you’d punch out and assemble into the shape of a sailboat with special boat stats and you make your boats fight. Great time waster in a college library. Haha, I'm pretty sure I still have a case full of those. It was a very neat idea for a game, but the balance was definitely all over the place. The design elements that allowed them to basically fit everything you needed to play a stripped down version of the full rules into a card sized booster pack was very impressive though.
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Sep 26, 2023 16:58
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Looking for recommendations on two different time periods (but both with the French! oui oui) that give a good overview and are hopefully a good read: First are the Italian wars of the early 1500s. I've always been fascinated by this period. It seems chaotic and at a crossroads of tactics and technologies and seemed like so much fighting for relatively small gains. Plus the "uniforms"/dress is some of the dandiest in all of history in my opinoin. Second are the Wars of the French Revolution. I'm going to buy the Osprey Essential Histories on this to get started but I'd love to hear about other titles. Another fascinating and chaotic time that interests me and while I'm pretty familiar with Napoleon's role (I have Chandler's volume on him), the fighting in the Vendee, Netherlands, and Germany are unknown except the broad strokes. Edit: Also open to any books on the 1814 campaign in France! ADudeWhoAbides fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Sep 26, 2023 |
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Sep 26, 2023 19:54
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Dunno if you are a podcast person but Age of Napoleon is a great one that covers his career during the French Revolutionary Wars at the start
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Sep 27, 2023 09:54
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The Panther tank is infamous for engine fires and an easy to break transmission. In this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeWV-9s7az8 video of a restoration at the 3 minute mark, they found a hole *someone* had drilled to show the oil level was ok...but leak oil everywhere. Enough so testing at the factory wouldn't see it., Is this a known issue with Panther production? I'm guessing we'll never know who was the hero who did this and I wonder how many other Panther tanks they did it to. It's right up there with the French truck manufacturer making the dip stick too short and all the trucks they produced for the the Germans time bombs of low oil failures.
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Sep 27, 2023 12:17
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Next let's talk about Nazi rifles being manufactured by slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Spoiler alert: If you use the people you are oppressing to mass produce your tools of said oppression, you're gonna have a bad time.
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Sep 27, 2023 12:25
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Comstar posted:It's right up there with the French truck manufacturer making the dip stick too short and all the trucks they produced for the the Germans time bombs of low oil failures. The Me163 on display at the USAF museum had the engine sabotaged by whatever Frenchman put it together, IIRC.
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Sep 27, 2023 12:40
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Comstar posted:
Wouldn't they have to make the dip stick too long for that? Chuck_D posted:Next let's talk about Nazi rifles being manufactured by slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentration camp. Beat me to it  It's a hilarious example where if you want a rifle to shoot you really want to avoid the SS contract stuff because - even above and beyond it being creepy to own a gun made by slave labor - there's a very real chance you're going to find out that the gas port wasn't drilled properly.
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Sep 27, 2023 13:47
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