Vincent Van Goatse posted:O'Connor was pretty neat, Dempsey did his job and did it well, and de Wiart was probably almost half as nutty as Wingate. Sadly a lot of them are unknowns unless you are really into the history of the British Army or actions during that war. It's a shame really because some of them were pretty good soldiers. Others will be rubbish. Gordon Bennet here is perhaps only known for a strained or irritated exclamation you might have heard from your grandad or gran that one time when you were a kid.
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Aug 4, 2018 16:21
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From a historical perspective it is a shame, but on the other hand if I am in a war there are much worse fates having a bunch of mildly competent generals who were able to do their job.
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Aug 4, 2018 16:23
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Hunt11 posted:From a historical perspective it is a shame, but on the other hand if I am in a war there are much worse fates having a bunch of mildly competent generals who were able to do their job. Oh hell yeah, hell being good still won't save you if you were caught and made a POW. I imagine the men themselves really were glad they survived.
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Aug 4, 2018 16:25
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SeanBeansShako posted:Gordon Bennet here is perhaps only known for a strained or irritated exclamation you might have heard from your grandad or gran that one time when you were a kid. I always heard that the Gordon Bennett in "Gordon Bennett!" isn't that Gordon Bennett (the first usage in print is from 1937), it's James Gordon Bennett Jr, the American news magnate and bon vivant. Trin Tragula fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Aug 4, 2018 |
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Aug 4, 2018 17:00
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:O'Connor was pretty neat, Dempsey did his job and did it well, and de Wiart was probably almost half as nutty as Wingate. Even if all the milhist has diminished my fascination of maybe experiencing war myself, de Wiart is still one of the guys I consider to be extremely cool. He went through two World Wars and wasn't that impressed.
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Aug 4, 2018 18:31
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Saber works. Melons were not on sale, so I made do with what was available. Video uploading, though I've misplaced my knockoff GoPro, had to use the big Nikon so it's not slowmo/from in the splash zone. (the bottle, the doggo only showed up after, he was at a safe distance when the sword was out.) (also Dad wanted to look at it in the hallway, and accidentally poked it into a doorframe surround so deep it took a bit of effort to get out.  )Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ref7pzN7GTc Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Aug 4, 2018 |
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Aug 4, 2018 19:07
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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Did you change the angle of the cut in the middle of your swing? Maybe next time try to keep your shoulder movement free as you swing, and imagine the end of the movement somwhere beyond your target.
HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Aug 4, 2018 |
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Aug 4, 2018 19:17
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Yeah, this is the second time I've cut anything with a saber, I could stand to improve my form. Edit: if that critique is just based on the photo, reload and watch the video, I watched it a few times at 1/4 speed and it looks like I hit it pretty straight and the bottle flexed. But you're the person with a degree in this poo poo. The other time was to try out the US1840 repro I mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTPLki6f24M I'm just not yet used to how much momentum these things have. Also lol "Say when." [pushes button] "When." Ah, those days when My Chemical Romance inspired fashion and we didn't have free video editing software. Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 19:29 on Aug 4, 2018 |
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Aug 4, 2018 19:24
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Chillbro Baggins posted:Edit: if that critique is just based on the photo, reload and watch the video, I watched it a few times at 1/4 speed and it looks like I hit it pretty straight and the bottle flexed. But you're the person with a degree in this poo poo.
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Aug 4, 2018 19:43
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And those pieces of paper are about stabby-type soldiers, not ... I can't think of a cutesy way to decribe Napoleonic-era light cavalry. The time Bad Cav Island almost got it right?
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Aug 4, 2018 19:49
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Gervasius posted:Question - did USSR have something similar, i.e. rocket-assisted penetration bombs? There's the BETAB-500 runway/concrete-piercing bomb. The ShP variant has a parachute to slow it's descent and orient itself above the target, then a rocket motor to punch into the surface. Russia's been using them in Syria for a while
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Aug 4, 2018 20:13
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Chillbro Baggins posted:And those pieces of paper are about stabby-type soldiers there are a wide range of swords out there and you can cut with many of them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapier#Description
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Aug 4, 2018 20:20
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HEY GUNS posted:stab and cut actually Ah, right, you talk about pike and shot so much I kinda forgot that swords were still big (in a figurative sense, rapiers were long but otherwise pretty dainty compared to Napoleonic-era stuff) at the time, but yeah, your dudes started traipsing around the Continent around the same time as Romeo and Juliet was published. I knew the dates of the 30YW, when rapiers were popular, and the First Folio, just never thought about all three of them at the same time, y'know? (And by "stabby" I was more referring to your pikemen.) Edit: derp also the era of the basket-hilt and similar swords, for the guys using them professionally (as opposed to the rapiers being more a gentleman's self-defense weapon). Like most of us here, both the academics and the amateurs, I know a lot about a few specific things, and everything else is just kind of all jumbled together. Also handy that most weapons I make a hobby of studying (Cavalry sabers, WWI British weapons, WWII-Cold War American weapons) has model numbers and half the time the model is the year of introduction.
Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Aug 4, 2018 |
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Aug 4, 2018 21:38
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spectralent posted:Speaking of the Vietnam stuff from a few days ago, how frequently were the conscripts able to call artillery and air support? Was there a ton of training involved for that? I'm aware that artillery observation is a specialist job that usually comes with a bunch of attendant equipment, so presumably it was a lot more guesswork, but was it particularly regimented or was it just getting on a phone and estimating a spot you wanted erased from reality? I think since at least ww2 every us combat arms officer and platoon and up nco's are trained in basic fire support calls. Not sure about air support, but I think it's something you would train before deploying to Vietnam. I think nowadays most of nato, follows the same sandard, officers and platoon and up nco gets training in fire support.
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Aug 4, 2018 22:29
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Since "how do they call in arty?" chat has returned, this is the thing I was talking about to divvy up the map grid to tell the arty where you are and where you want the steel rain. I still have one around here somewhere that I stole from the US Government in high school (the statute of limitations on stealing a <1-cent plastic card is less than 18 years, right?) Something along the lines of "I'm on map [map ID number] grid square C-12, [the numbers in the appropriate-scale window positioned over your square of the map to narrow your position to a point*, I forget the phrasing], I need fire 300 yards away* at 150 degrees." *edit: actually, given the scales of maps, you probably don't want to ask them to shoot the other end of a football field using this system. This is better for "make that place a couple miles away cease to exist." Like my pa with the Arc Lights, that's about the level of accuracy for that thing, unless you can point out a specific hilltop as a reference for your position and the redlegs are bringing their A-game. Surely there's a former artilleryman/somebody who's called in arty that can explain it better. Also Dad story time: One time he called for any arty available, we're being overrun, that sort of thing. The guy that answered argued with him over the security codewords to make sure Dad was really who he said he was, eventually said "Confirm danger close?" at rather farther than the Army's biggest shells, but Dad didn't have time to think, and replied "YES! FIREFIREFIRE!" An eternity later (relative to regular arty, both subjectively and as measured by a stopwatch), the guy in charge of the battery radioed back "splash, over" which is radiospeak for "It's five seconds from impact, watch it hit and tell me how to correct." but when you're within the blast radius, it's more "Better dig loving faster, you poor groundpounders." The shells came screaming in, and the world exploded. When Dad and co. dug themselves out of their foxholes, the place the VC had been looked like the surface of the Moon, and did not need another volley. He's pretty sure that was a full broadside of HC from New Jersey. Nothing land-based makes craters that big.  Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Aug 4, 2018 |
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Aug 4, 2018 23:16
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Nebakenezzer posted:Who was that American General in...Burma who was trying to make a SS, American style? (IE not racist but selected specifically for ideology to make them tougher in the face of adversity?) Makes me think of Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Go figure. I would also contend that 'American-style' and 'not racist' are hardly the same thing... though I understand what you're getting at in the context of a comparison to Nazi Germany.
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Aug 5, 2018 04:02
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Chillbro Baggins posted:When Dad and co. dug themselves out of their foxholes, the place the VC had been looked like the surface of the Moon, and did not need another volley. He's pretty sure that was a full broadside of HC from New Jersey. Nothing land-based makes craters that big. That's a badass story that I love. Vincent Van Goatse posted:O'Connor was pretty neat, Dempsey did his job and did it well, and de Wiart was probably almost half as nutty as Wingate. I saw O'Conner interviewed in The World At War and the guy was very hard -- on himself. I wanted to give him a hug Nebakenezzer fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Aug 5, 2018 |
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Aug 5, 2018 04:21
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Chillbro Baggins posted:
This is pretty much it, you don't need a protractor to do it though. All you need for relative sure is your own position and a bearing to the target, after that the FDC can handle everything. So, you give them your grid, a bearing to the target, and an estimated range to the target. The FDC converts everything to mils, accounts for declination, wind, temperature, etc etc, and throws their best guess out there. It is pretty rare for it to be off by more than 500m or so; if the target is much closer than that it is "danger close" and they just make sure to fire long and walk back to the target rather than bracket it. You adjust the fire by providing feedback to the FDC (ie, "drop 100") which again, they do all the calculations themselves (the guns are almost certainly firing obliquely at the target relative to the FO, so they are adjusting on their axis, not yours). Dropping precision rounds is a little different: you need a mensurated target to get full use of the PGM capability, which means more advanced rangefinding and simple triangulation by the FO instead of just a best guess. You also have to account for altitude differences, which is really only possible through GPS. To expand more on the training question from earlier: FDC guys can generally walk anyone through a fire mission, provided that the person they are talking to knows their own position (or can at least provide two visible reference points) and can see the target. It turns into more of a computer help line sort of thing if you have an untrained observer on the line as you kind of have to walk them through the process, but just about anyone can do it as long as they know how to work the radio. Like, imagine talking your grandmother through installing AOL or something over the phone, it is basically the same idea. Air is more difficult as you need to know things like IP reference points, although even this kind of thing is becoming less important as we're entering the age of "program a grid into a munition and the munition does the rest of the work."
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Aug 5, 2018 04:59
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Nebakenezzer posted:Who was that American General in...Burma who was trying to make a SS, American style? (IE not racist but selected specifically for ideology to make them tougher in the face of adversity?) There was Evan Carlson, who wanted to make the Marine Raiders a force in the Chinese Red Army tradition of self-criticism and political indoctrination, right down to the rations. He apparently introduced the phrase 'Gung Ho' to the English language
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Aug 5, 2018 08:56
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bewbies posted:[How artillery is aimed] Good post, really explains the details. All my info comes from a guy who once dropped hand grenades at his feet while sprinting with the enemy following five seconds behind, regular infantry is somewhat less crazy. Also one time Dad shot a guy with his .45, dude popped out of a bush RIGHT THERE, Dad drew his 1911 from his shoulder holster and put two tracers into the baddie. When Dad got back to camp and reloaded the pistol mag, he put three rounds in. He figures the other one was ND'd under his armpit because he was understandably a bit panicked on the draw. If you have archives, I posted a thread or two of Dad's war stories as I remember them years ago, I really need to convince him to write a book or, better, tell them on video. Sure, they're apocryphal/exaggerated, but cf the fish that got away, same concept. Like Mark Twain said, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
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Aug 5, 2018 10:00
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https://twitter.com/IrelandSkycam/status/1025765631013076992
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Aug 5, 2018 13:24
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Yvonmukluk posted:There was Evan Carlson, who wanted to make the Marine Raiders a force in the Chinese Red Army tradition of self-criticism and political indoctrination, right down to the rations. He apparently introduced the phrase 'Gung Ho' to the English language that's Evans Carlson, apparently  Evan just got me some canadian on wikipedia
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Aug 5, 2018 15:55
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Reading about the Spanish Flu in detail for the first time, and oh my, this really was the precursor to every zombie apocalypse film/tv show to come afterwards right? I'm surprised there hasn't been an alternative history series about what if the spanish flu was bad enough to collapse western governments shortly after the end of WWI.
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Aug 5, 2018 16:34
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Chillbro Baggins posted:Since "how do they call in arty?" chat has returned, this is the thing I was talking about to divvy up the map grid to tell the arty where you are and where you want the steel rain. I still have one around here somewhere that I stole from the US Government in high school (the statute of limitations on stealing a <1-cent plastic card is less than 18 years, right?) Read that story 3 times already, cool every time.
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Aug 5, 2018 17:13
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HEY GUNS posted:This is why when you and I were trying to define fascism a while back I said that "militarism" isn't exactly the right word--they like the idea of combat and the idea of armies, but real life armies are potential rivals for power and big messy organizations full of institutional knowledge like that also tend to be something revolutionaries like nazis hate That's the thing I think about them as a totalitarian force. They'll make alliances with existing institutional forces...the military, the churches, big industry, if they think it will benefit them, but they can never trust those institutions, because those institutions have independent powerbases and traditions. Therefore, they'll set up parallel institutions to subvert and control the existing ones. So, you get things like the Waffen SS, the German Christian movement, German major industrial leaders accepting SS membership and setting up slave labor in concentration camps, and so on.
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Aug 5, 2018 18:04
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Epicurius posted:That's the thing I think about them as a totalitarian force. They'll make alliances with existing institutional forces...the military, the churches, big industry, if they think it will benefit them, but they can never trust those institutions, because those institutions have independent powerbases and traditions. Therefore, they'll set up parallel institutions to subvert and control the existing ones. So, you get things like the Waffen SS, the German Christian movement, German major industrial leaders accepting SS membership and setting up slave labor in concentration camps, and so on. Parallel institutions are common though in traditional ancien regime style dictatorships though, so it's hard to argue this is diagnostic of a particularly fascist political system. See for example the Saudi National Guard.
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Aug 5, 2018 19:15
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Raenir Salazar posted:Reading about the Spanish Flu in detail for the first time, and oh my, this really was the precursor to every zombie apocalypse film/tv show to come afterwards right? I'd watch a zombie movie set during the Spring Offensive.
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Aug 5, 2018 19:22
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Does the US military count since the National Guard is controlled by state governments? 
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Aug 5, 2018 19:23
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Corsair Pool Boy posted:I'd watch a zombie movie set during the Spring Offensive. Deathwatch is not a zombie movie but it's a fun watch.
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Aug 5, 2018 20:23
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Corsair Pool Boy posted:I'd watch a zombie movie set during the Spring Offensive. There was a Harry Turtledove short story set in the French trenches where the Apocalypse from Revelation happens and nobody notices.
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Aug 5, 2018 21:05
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Epicurius posted:There was a Harry Turtledove short story set in the French trenches where the Apocalypse from Revelation happens and nobody notices. Took forever to find the title of this. It was "Ils ne passeront pas", and can be read in the collection "Counting Up, Counting Down". It is pretty funny (essentially, they mistake the Last Trump for an airplane-mounted siren, machine-gun the Four Horsemen, wonder why the hell the Germans thought that would work, and carry on with the war) in a very dark sense.
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Aug 5, 2018 21:25
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Did they actually use bones and stuff as tools in the trenches? Once read that unidentified bones were sometimes used as hangers and such. Seems way too gruesome to be true, but that seems like the entirety of trench warfare really.
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Aug 5, 2018 21:30
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Mostly for EE's benifit: somebody in the OSHA thread found a cache of Soviet OSHA posters: ekuNNN posted:http://bieganski-the-blog.blogspot.com/2012/09/dont-walk-on-fish-soviet-safety-posters.html?m=1
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Aug 5, 2018 21:43
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Christ that last one.
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Aug 5, 2018 21:45
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13th KRRC War Diary, 4th August 1918 posted:Visibility only fair owing to mist. 13th KRRC War Diary, 5th August 1918 posted:Lt. PICKERING and 2nd Lt. BARRIE attempted to raid one of the enemies posts at L 3 c 20,15. This post is surrounded by a thick belt of barbed wire. The raiding party was therefore divided into three groups.
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Aug 5, 2018 21:50
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https://i.imgur.com/BHywvSz.gifv Fw-190 testing skipping bombs
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Aug 5, 2018 22:04
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Jobbo_Fett posted:https://i.imgur.com/BHywvSz.gifv Cool! Was this ever used as a tactic, or did some Nazi see this and say "I can improve this! Use Torpedoes!" And an improvement it was not
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Aug 6, 2018 03:23
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It was actually used by the Allies during Operation Chastise, which destroyed the Möhne and Edersee Dams hydroelectric dams in Germany. It was also used in the Pacific theater, when the allies were sending B-17s and B-25s at Japanese ships. It kind of worked, because Japanese ship-borne AA is bad enough to make it viable. The most common Japanese destroyers used the 12.7 cm/50 Type 3 as their main gun. It was supposed to be a duel purpose gun, but it was almost useless for AA. It also gives large bombers a small chance of hitting a ship, instead of zero chance of doing so. But real torpedo planes and dive bombers were always better at attacking ships. You can read more about it here. golden bubble fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Aug 6, 2018 |
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Aug 6, 2018 03:33
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Did the skip bombing crews in the Pacific use more than one bounce though?
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Aug 6, 2018 04:00
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https://mobile.twitter.com/archaeologymag/status/1026135743431827458
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