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Schenck v. U.S. posted:For people who have somehow mercifully avoided learning about the state of American politics, the president has a couple phrases that he uses habitually. When he says some variation of "nobody is talking about this" or "people don't ask the question" or "nobody knew that this was so complicated", he means that he personally was ignorant of something and he wants to normalize that. When the president says "a lot of people are saying" something or "many people believe" he means that he believes that thing and wants represent that belief as normal and widely held. No need to speculate on where he gets his Jackson boner from.
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May 1, 2017 16:45
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So thread I've been a bit down lately and have been watching two things on Netflix: the new MST3K (And the old MST3K they posted, some great episodes in there including Future War: it's not set in the future and there is no war) and that PBS civil war documentary again. Question about Grant's march against Lee: did he have to kill so many of his own men? Like it seems Grant is engaging, then wheeling to the left, repeat. I know his ultimate goal was to take the Confederate capital, (and maybe to tie down a poo poo ton of confederate soldiers while the other two Union armies make their coordinated attacks) but a lot of the attacks made seem like "charge directly at the Confederate prepared defenses" sorta thing, IE it never works and it makes many of your men dead. Is this just a hindsight is 20/20 thing? Or did Grant just want to keep Lee perpetually engaged?
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May 1, 2017 17:04
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Grant admits Cold Harbor was a useless gently caress up. But in general keeping the pressure on to eventually corner Lee was a better plan than McClellan-style withdrawing after every defeat and waiting six months in camp while losing as as many men to disease as he would have fighting.
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May 1, 2017 17:09
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Polikarpov posted:Well guys I was going through a Hunnicutt book on the Bradley and other US vehicles and found peak 1950s I feel obligated to point out that this isn't quite as insane as it looks. That's a Davy Crocket nuke rifle, and the warhead that it lobbed was in the .1-.2 KT range. To put things in perspective Fat Man was a 21kt bomb - a davy crocket is a hundredth as powerful as a relatively small bomb. This is where you're in to truly tactical nukes. They had a range of about 1.25 miles and were intended to be area denial weapons that were cheap to deploy (at least as far as manpower goes). Tiny devices like that are also some of the ugliest when it comes to short term localized radiation - a Davy Crocket is basically just an upjumped dirty bomb. Half the purpose wouldn't necessarily be to vaporize the advancing Soviet armored divisions, but make the Fulda Gap radioactive enough that it would be a pain in the rear end to get through. Either way, the guns had a long enough range for a low yield warhead like that that the crews weren't exactly getting caught in the blast and, as long as they were up wind, probably not getting too much radiation either.
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May 1, 2017 17:33
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Grant lost a ton of men in his pursuit of Lee, but Lee took fearsome casualties as well-and Grant could afford the losses, while Lee's army began to dissolve under the constant pressure. Grant made a number of mistakes, and admitted them openly-especially, as P-Mack mentioned, at Cold Harbor. It's worth noting that, after the Battle of the WIlderness, Grant's pursuit of Lee in the Overland campaign was the first time the Union Army had actually bothered to pursue the Confederates after a battle, as opposed to marching back north to lick their wounds. Grant's value as a commander was that he was capable of keeping calm in a crisis and keeping his sights on the goal of ultimate victory, and this was invaluable for the Union after suffering through the mediocrity of McClellen, Hooker, and Burnside.
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May 1, 2017 17:43
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Burnside, for all his faults, didn't actually pull back from Fredericksburg after the battle. He kept the Army of the Potomac more or less in place and tried again to take Richmond at the beginning of 1863. Of course, it all went to poo poo because Fortune hated Burnside.
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May 1, 2017 18:50
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Can you imagine being Robert E. Lee immediately after the battle of the Wilderness, listening to scout reports that the union forces had turned south after disengaging? You have to imagine that Lee grasped the strategic situation he was in, and that he knew, right then and there, what this change in union habits meant for his army.
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May 1, 2017 18:52
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Nebakenezzer posted:Question about Grant's march against Lee: did he have to kill so many of his own men? Grant's ultimate goal was not the Confederate capital, but Lee's army. It just happens that an army cut off from its principal supply base is much easier to destroy. The distinction doesn't mean much in that the AotP was often trying to get between the AoNV and Richmond either way, but it absolutely does tie into Grant's desire to keep Lee 'perpetually engaged,' like you said. Like you mentioned, keeping Confederate forces tied up and unable to reinforce each other (as at Chickamauga the year before) was a major goal of Union operations in 1864, and Grant figured that, whatever losses the Union incurred, victory was only a matter of time as long as the Confederate armies could be kept separate. Grant wrote Lincoln during Spotsylvania that he intended to keep fighting there all summer, because he expected Lee's army to break by then. At the time, Grant had good reason to think that would happen, because he had sent strong Union forces to destroy Lee's supply chains and force Lee to either be destroyed in Virginia, or withdraw and be caught on the retreat. This being the Eastern theater in the Civil War, these subsidiary attacks were all commanded by a combination of political hacks and backbiting professionals, and all of them ended in embarrassing failure. Grant then had little option but to rely solely on the AotP's ability to either outmarch Lee or attack his fortifications, neither of which were that army's strong suits. MrYenko posted:Can you imagine being Robert E. Lee immediately after the battle of the Wilderness, listening to scout reports that the union forces had turned south after disengaging? Lee's initial interpretation of Grant's disengagement was that the Union army was moving east to Fredericksburg rather than south to Spotsylvania. Why would any Union army ever move south after a fight like the Wilderness? And Lee absolutely knew what the situation was. While at Cold Harbor, he is supposed to have told Jubal Early* that unless Grant's forces were destroyed before they reached the James River, they'd be faced with an unwinnable siege. [*] Early isn't the most trustworthy source on this, but others tend to confirm that Lee had expressed such thoughts at other times during the campaign. dublish fucked around with this message at 19:14 on May 1, 2017 |
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May 1, 2017 19:01
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Nebakenezzer posted:Like it seems Grant is engaging, then wheeling to the left, repeat. I know his ultimate goal was to take the Confederate capital, (and maybe to tie down a poo poo ton of confederate soldiers while the other two Union armies make their coordinated attacks) but a lot of the attacks made seem like "charge directly at the Confederate prepared defenses" sorta thing, IE it never works and it makes many of your men dead. Is this just a hindsight is 20/20 thing? Or did Grant just want to keep Lee perpetually engaged? The first thing to bear in mind is that Grant's target was really the ANV, not Richmond...by the spring of '64 there really wasn't a great deal of strategic value left even in Richmond...Virginia had essentially been gutted, and there were already plans in motion to have the ANV retreat south into the Carolinas to join up with the Army of Tennesee/Army of the South and continue the fight from there. As for Grant's (and Meade's, for that matter) performance during the campaign...it was mixed. There wasn't a whole lot of room for fancy strategic maneuver in the area, but it also wasn't necessary to repeatedly conduct frontal attacks, as witnessed by the series of maneuvers that eventually pinned Lee down at Petersburg. It is often said that Grant did well to turn the campaign into a war of attrition, but I personally think that it was a relatively poor overall strategy - the obscene casualties and the general lack of progress very nearly lost the 1864 election for Lincoln, which would have been a de facto victory for the south. Grant's buddy Sherman bailed him out by taking Atlanta and defeating Hood on the eve of the election.
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May 1, 2017 19:18
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The City Museum of Helsinki just released an absolute ton of old photos online. They are about the city of Helsinki, but some of the stuff predates WW1 and the collection includes quite a few photos of Russian soldiers and officers from before and during that war, and of Finland during WW2. Here is information about it all: https://www.helsinkikuvia.fi/about/ And here are the photo albums: https://www.helsinkikuvia.fi/collection/public/
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May 1, 2017 20:00
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bewbies posted:The first thing to bear in mind is that Grant's target was really the ANV, not Richmond...by the spring of '64 there really wasn't a great deal of strategic value left even in Richmond...Virginia had essentially been gutted, and there were already plans in motion to have the ANV retreat south into the Carolinas to join up with the Army of Tennesee/Army of the South and continue the fight from there. Thanks for the replies guys. It blows my mind that the south could have won if only they had unseated Abraham Lincoln, and it was only at the last minute that the Union army came through with the needed victory. e: How much did Fredrick Douglas own, because from his quotes in this documentary it sounds like "a whole hell of a lot."
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May 1, 2017 20:30
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feedmegin posted:Why do you think the Soviet Union was more sexist than anywhere else in the 50s and 60s? Last page quote but no, I don't believe the soviet union was better in any way. However: there are a fuckload of Tankies that do, since the soviet propaganda was adamant that it was. I wast just trying to emphasize that it wasn't.
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May 1, 2017 20:34
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ThisIsJohnWayne posted:Last page quote but no, I don't believe the soviet union was better in any way. However: there are a fuckload of Tankies that do, since the soviet propaganda was adamant that it was. I wast just trying to emphasize that it wasn't. 
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May 1, 2017 20:44
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ThisIsJohnWayne posted:Last page quote but no, I don't believe the soviet union was better in any way. However: there are a fuckload of Tankies that do, since the soviet propaganda was adamant that it was. I wast just trying to emphasize that it wasn't. I'm not saying it was necessarily better, though the point is at least arguable in some areas; it was more weird to me that you said 'especially the Soviet Union' like they were notoriously worse than e.g. notable paragon of women's rights 50s America.
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May 1, 2017 20:58
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ThisIsJohnWayne posted:Last page quote but no, I don't believe the soviet union was better in any way. However: there are a fuckload of Tankies that do, since the soviet propaganda was adamant that it was. I wast just trying to emphasize that it wasn't. Soviet Women had full equal rights in the eyes of the law, and participation in work force as equals to men, before women could even vote in the United States. Abortion was even legal until Stalin.
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May 1, 2017 21:00
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Nebakenezzer posted:Thanks for the replies guys. I don't see how a Democratic government could have actually made peace even if they'd won. They had huge portions of the South already occupied, the status of unionist Confederate areas like east Tennessee would be thorny issue. And there's hundreds of thousands of escaped slaves, many of them bearing arms and wearing blue. By late 1864 the Confederacy was basically dead already. Regarding Douglass, Lincoln mentioned to him during one of their meetings that if he lost the election he wanted to get as many black people to the north as possible during his lame duck period, which would have made peace overtures even harder.
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May 1, 2017 21:01
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Nebakenezzer posted:e: How much did Fredrick Douglas own, Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.
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May 1, 2017 21:06
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While you all make good points, to me it just seems like different degrees in hell. This is my opinion and as such does not belong in this thread.
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May 1, 2017 21:08
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P-Mack posted:I don't see how a Democratic government could have actually made peace even if they'd won. They had huge portions of the South already occupied, the status of unionist Confederate areas like east Tennessee would be thorny issue. And there's hundreds of thousands of escaped slaves, many of them bearing arms and wearing blue. By late 1864 the Confederacy was basically dead already. It's less about the north losing the war and more the south negotiating a surrender. With a democrat in office you're going to see a lot more willingness to negotiate, perhaps including confederates staying in southern government or maybe even the 14A never happening.
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May 1, 2017 21:08
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zoux posted:Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice. And the thing is, people, that nobody is talking about this! Here was a guy, born into slavery, very terrible thing, very hard for the children, who, bing, bang, boom, easy, learned to read, beat up a slave owner and escaped to the north!
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May 1, 2017 21:12
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But the Soviet Union's not in that picture 
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May 1, 2017 21:11
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P-Mack posted:I don't see how a Democratic government could have actually made peace even if they'd won. They had huge portions of the South already occupied, the status of unionist Confederate areas like east Tennessee would be thorny issue. And there's hundreds of thousands of escaped slaves, many of them bearing arms and wearing blue. By late 1864 the Confederacy was basically dead already. You're maybe thinking of the ACW as something closer to WWI or WWII - it was very different from these, in a lot of ways. Had the McClellan won the election, and presumably the Democrats taken both houses (they probably would have gotten the house, the senate was a little more iffy), there were two probable outcomes. McClellan wanted to negotiate the south rejoining the union (which presumably would have required the preservation of slavery, and the assurance that it wouldn't ever be threatened again); Vallandigham and Pendleton wanted to immediately end the war no matter what which in practice probably meant a separate CSA. It is very difficult to say which faction would have won out had the Dems won the election, but it probably wouldn't have mattered all that much to the south: in either case, slavery is protected and the planter class can get on about its business unmolested. Point being, percent territory occupied, number of cannons produced, miles of railroad, etc, all didn't mean a whole lot in this scenario - the only relevant factor was the political will of the north, and had things crapped out in the west as well as the east, that will would have been completely gone by November. The one crazy alt history factor here is one you allude to: Lincoln's plan had he lost the election. In the summer/early fall of 1864 he was assuming 1) he'd lose, badly, and 2) the union was dead. The Blind Memorandum was his first step in some sort of war winning/union saving blitz. This presumably would have taken the form of some massive winter offensive in both theaters in an attempt to break the south's will to fight prior to the new administration coming in (at this time they didn't do the inauguration until March) and that would have been some crazy poo poo although a pretty long chance in both theaters.
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May 1, 2017 21:23
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Nebakenezzer posted:It blows my mind that the south could have won if only they had unseated Abraham Lincoln, and it was only at the last minute that the Union army came through with the needed victory "at the last minute" is an exaggeration; Sherman captured Atlanta on September 2 and the election was on November 8. That victory was intimately associated with Lincoln's victory in the 1864 election but there was more of a gap in time than is obvious in distant retrospect. You also can't look at the Atlanta Campaign as some kind of "for want of a nail" scenario, because Union forces won very decisively and the Confederacy was never really in it. It's interesting to speculate but I don't think the Army of Tennessee could have delayed Sherman for much longer than they did. I would actually say a more likely counterfactual is Atlanta falling sooner than September 2. If you assume that Jefferson Davis let Johnston remain in command, he probably would have continued his strategy of withdrawing to avoid destroying his army in hopeless battles, and I think he would have conceded Atlanta sooner than Hood was forced to do.
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May 1, 2017 21:44
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Yeah, I get that it was all political, but I think once the new government took office and started negotiating the nuts and bolts of a deal they'd see just how close to victory they already were and have a very tough time justifying major concessions. Appomattox was barely a month after inauguration. e: Reconstruction would likely be an even bigger failure than irl though, I'll give you that. P-Mack fucked around with this message at 21:48 on May 1, 2017 |
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May 1, 2017 21:43
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I think that had the Democrats won that they would have viewed the victory as compelling them to negotiate with significant concessions regardless of the situation of the war, sort of "let's welcome our lost brothers in to the fold/an end to war" type thing.
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May 1, 2017 21:47
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SeanBeansShako posted:I wish zombie Andrew Jackson would get a big stick and correct his history personally if you know what I mean.
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May 1, 2017 21:49
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beaten
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May 1, 2017 21:50
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Grant lost a ton of men in his pursuit of Lee, but Lee took fearsome casualties as well-and Grant could afford the losses, while Lee's army began to dissolve under the constant pressure. HEY GUNS fucked around with this message at 21:59 on May 1, 2017 |
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May 1, 2017 21:57
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HEY GAIL posted:zombie TR is stronger, but zombie Jackson would be meaner 
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May 1, 2017 22:03
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Nebakenezzer posted:e: How much did Fredrick Douglas own, because from his quotes in this documentary it sounds like "a whole hell of a lot." Super loving hard. The bit I find most interesting is that a lot of white folks apparently refused to believe he had ever been a slave, because how could a slave be so damned eloquent? He's like a walking rebuttal to scientific racism, and that's rad as hell.
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May 1, 2017 22:39
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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PittTheElder posted:Super loving hard. The bit I find most interesting is that a lot of white folks apparently refused to believe he had ever been a slave, because how could a slave be so damned eloquent? He's like a walking rebuttal to scientific racism, and that's rad as hell. Yeah like the foreword of his Narrative had a white person or two testifying that yes, he totally wrote it himself and they can confirm at least most of the events.
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May 1, 2017 22:49
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I just want to make clear, I don't think (barring some surprising advancement of NK's nuclear capability), the south is going to be rendered an uninhabitable ruin. I do think, though, that being able to kill tens of thousands of people if ever invaded is one hell of a deterrence argument, given that we live in a world with TVs and stuff now and a several dozen people dying is a disaster and hundreds is a calamity. It puts the north's threat to invade into serious question, but it makes actively attacking them a rather ugly question, especially when coupled with the second part of the rundown that any regime change is going to make 25 million people, a huge proportion of which lack basic life needs, someone's problem, where "someone" is "modern developed nations we expect to not rule over the suffering and starving with an iron, autocratic fist". Basically, "Why doesn't NK invade the south?" has a ton of counterfactuals, "Why don't we invade the north?" has a bunch of significant, ugly costs attached.
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May 2, 2017 02:17
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bewbies posted:As for Grant's (and Meade's, for that matter) performance during the campaign...it was mixed. There wasn't a whole lot of room for fancy strategic maneuver in the area, but it also wasn't necessary to repeatedly conduct frontal attacks, as witnessed by the series of maneuvers that eventually pinned Lee down at Petersburg. It is often said that Grant did well to turn the campaign into a war of attrition, but I personally think that it was a relatively poor overall strategy - the obscene casualties and the general lack of progress very nearly lost the 1864 election for Lincoln, which would have been a de facto victory for the south. Grant's buddy Sherman bailed him out by taking Atlanta and defeating Hood on the eve of the election. Setting up a siege was the right thing to do but did he really have the option to do that without attacking first. If Grant had told Lincoln that he was going to march south, plant himself in front of Lee and attrition him out over a year or two what response would he get?
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May 2, 2017 03:38
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Re: Grant, you have to constantly think of what he's doing in a double-act context with Sherman. They are actively coordinating and understand that a) simultaneous heavy casualties on both fronts is politically unsustainable but (b) that Grant can pursue a much more attritional strategy that slowly grinds and pins Lee's army while Sherman dismantles everyone in the West.
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May 2, 2017 03:52
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Bates posted:Setting up a siege was the right thing to do but did he really have the option to do that without attacking first. If Grant had told Lincoln that he was going to march south, plant himself in front of Lee and attrition him out over a year or two what response would he get? "Sounds good, just don't retreat."
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May 2, 2017 07:24
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spectralent posted:I just want to make clear, I don't think (barring some surprising advancement of NK's nuclear capability), the south is going to be rendered an uninhabitable ruin. I do think, though, that being able to kill tens of thousands of people if ever invaded is one hell of a deterrence argument, given that we live in a world with TVs and stuff now and a several dozen people dying is a disaster and hundreds is a calamity. It puts the north's threat to invade into serious question, but it makes actively attacking them a rather ugly question, especially when coupled with the second part of the rundown that any regime change is going to make 25 million people, a huge proportion of which lack basic life needs, someone's problem, where "someone" is "modern developed nations we expect to not rule over the suffering and starving with an iron, autocratic fist". A new Korean war is going to kill tens of thousands of people no matter what.
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May 2, 2017 10:49
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aphid_licker posted:A new Korean war is going to kill tens of thousands of people no matter what. will the deathtoll outweigh that of starcraft?
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May 2, 2017 11:15
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WW2 DATA German small arms and aircraft cannons are ready to check out. Which rounds were used for a tapered bore gun? Which rounds had tungsten carbide cores? What kind of rounds were available in 7.92mm? All that and more at the blog! (Sorry for being late, complete forgot yesterday due to being auper busy) Jobbo_Fett fucked around with this message at 15:17 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 11:43
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When talking about the decisions made by historical generals, particularly those before the advent of modern intelligence gathering and communications, we always need to remember that they are working with extremely limited and/or misleading information and have to make decisions constantly and on the fly. Not the mention the fact that army officers are not perfect decision making automatons, they get sick, drunk, tired and depressed, all of which contributes to decisions that probably made sense on the ground at the time, but look worse when examined over 150 years later when we already know the outcome.
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May 2, 2017 11:59
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MikeCrotch posted:When talking about the decisions made by historical generals, particularly those before the advent of modern intelligence gathering and communications, we always need to remember that they are working with extremely limited and/or misleading information and have to make decisions constantly and on the fly. Moreover they likely haven't had any formal training or teaching in high level command and have just been handed an army and told to get on with the job. In the modern era when someone wants to take the leap from batallion to brigade command they're sent back to school for a year or so to be taught how to do it because the role once you shift away from directly commanding a battle is so very different. Historically you'd just be promoted up.
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