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Blckdrgn posted:Page Two, tsk. His tanks run out of fuel and he has to hitchhike to Baku. e: comedy option: Turkish government gets couped by Russia/UK like Iran. sullat fucked around with this message at 02:15 on Oct 18, 2012 |
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Oct 18, 2012 02:09
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SlothfulCobra posted:My favorite part of the cold war is the space race. Soviets get the first man in space, then the first satellite, but then America gets the first man on the moon, and that means we won. Well, the Soviet's lunar rocket (the N-1) kept on blowing up, while the American Saturn V was pretty good (except for Tom Hank's mission, of course). The Apollo 1 accident was due to bad design flaws in the capsule, so were easier to iron out. Of course, the Soviet's program was very secretive, so we didn't know how they were doing or how much resources were allocated to the project. We assumed that they were as serious about it as we were, pursuing our dream of conquering the moon with brutal Soviet efficiency, when it turns out that it was mostly a side project for them.
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Oct 19, 2012 05:20
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I seem to recall from one memoir from an enlistee that recruits were classified "A", "B", and "C", with healthy young lads (A) being sent into the infantry, people a little worse for the wear (B) were tankers, artillery, support and the like, while "C" dudes were cooks and stretcher-bearers. He had dropped out of high school to enlist in 1945, so things might have been different than someone enlisting in 42 or drafted in 44.
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Oct 19, 2012 18:03
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quote:Curiously, the Germans had been working on their own version of Window, named Düppel ('Dipole'). In 1942 the head of the Luftwaffe's signals service, Wolfgang Martini, presented a report to Göring, emphasizing the danger that a countermeasure like Düppel presented to the Reich Air Defence. Göring was horrified. He ordered all copies of Martini's report destroyed and research on Düppel and countermeasures to be halted, lest the secret leak out. It was yet another of the Fat Man's grand errors and the lack of research on countermasures was to greatly set back the night defences. "Hey, our radar is vulnerable to a cheap, easy to manufacture, and effective countermeasure. We should do something about that." "Quick! Destroy the report! Stop all research! Lest the Allies find out about it!"
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Oct 28, 2012 17:31
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Rabhadh posted:They couldn't afford him, the Ottomans could. No great mystery. This was before the time of nationalism as well, so your choices were either one royal house or the other. Engineers were very important mercenaries so they'd command a big wage. He was also German, not Greek.
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Nov 2, 2012 23:47
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Phobophilia posted:Well, what stopped a noble from simply murdering particularly skilled mercenaries should their contract expire and he receive word that they were going to flip to the other side? It happened occasionally (see Xenophon, for example) but mercenaries do have swords and aren't afraid to use them (see Manzikert, for example. The Turkish and Frankish mercenaries refused to fight and ended up plundering central Anatolia for a bit). . Besides, until the rise of the levee en masse and national armies, everyone needed them, so murdering them wasn't always practical. The Mongols were pretty big on telling siege engineers to "work for us or we'll kill you" so it was an option if you didn't give any fucks. Supposedly "Urban" ended up being quite literally hoist on his own petard, which was seen as divine justice for serving the Mohammadeans, but who knows for sure what happened.
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Nov 3, 2012 01:57
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Mans posted:When you can draw massive numbers of soldiers from your own populace it becomes obsolete to pay exorbitant prices for a few hundred men. The rise of professional armies in Europe during the XVIth century marked a considerable decline in the popularity of mercenary use, specially when compared to the "real" stuff they proved mediocre, as seen in the Italian wars. In the 19th and 20th century, there were a lot of European "adventurers" sloshing around the world training foreign nation's armies in modern warfare techniques. "Chinese" Gordon and his ilk, Chennault in KMT China and Russian advisors with Mao, the German and Russian advisors that faced off during the Chaco war, the Serbians in the Congo, and probably many more that I'm forgetting.
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Nov 4, 2012 06:15
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Oxford Comma posted:I really only have a vague memory of this from growing up in the 1980s, but weren't car bombs and whatnot being used by the Irish against British soldiers in Ireland? Northern Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom. Many of the Catholics there would rather be part of Ireland, and were willing to fight for the British. But the Protestants were not as keen on that, and were willing to fight to stay part of the United Kingdom. So the area was under martial law for quite some time, so the IRA was attacking British soldiers. Here's a short video of an English reporter interviewing people in Northern Ireland on the subject.
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Nov 4, 2012 20:03
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Nenonen posted:I have heard that England used to occupy parts of USA back in 18th century. I thought USA and UK were allies like Germany and France, what's up with that? In the 18th century? The British thought they were our colonial overlords, so we had to boot them out. We're our own colonial overlords, now. They didn't leave willingly, and after the Peace of Paris they had forts in American territory and were arming Indians who were fighting the westward expansion (Tecumseh, for example). So after the War of 1812 and the death of Tecumseh, they agreed to withdraw. There were more disputes over the northern border until the 1840s (in Minnesota, Maine, and Washington), some came close to blows, but cooler heads usually prevailed.
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Nov 6, 2012 22:04
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DasReich posted:I would say it would be debatable. The relative size of the front combined with the German strategy of simply tying up as many Allied troops as possible seems to me the best way to tip the scales in the cross channel invasion pretty much anyone could see coming. Where is the endgame in this campaign anyway? Where does the offensive stop? Once you hit the Alps you're in pretty poor country until you hit central Germany. The Germans had nightmarish logistical problems moving into Austria during the Anschluss, and that was unopposed. Combat conditions would probably magnify that significantly. Well, the invasion of Sicily provided much needed practice for the Allies. Also, knocking Italy out of the war was probably a net positive. And don't forget that the endgame was that the Allies did an end run around the Alps, invading Southern France in August of 44. (Churchill, having failed to learn the lessons of the Salonika campaign, wanted to invade the Balkans and Greece, but thankfully we didn't listen to him.)
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Nov 9, 2012 17:37
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General China posted:The luftwaffe couldn't make their minds up between radar stations, airbases, political or industrial targets. Their first attack on radar stations knocked a huge hole in the radar defence by destroying the buildings under the radar towers. The towers were not touched being made out of steel girders- hard to damage with he bombs. The allies had similar indecision on what to focus on at first, until they were able to say, "gently caress it, bomb everything" with tens of thousands of bombers at their disposal. Part of the issue was that strategic bombing was a new technology, supposed to be a silver bullet, and Goering was switching between targets, trying to find the exhaust port above Britain's reactor core, to mix a metaphor.
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Nov 10, 2012 16:44
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Lord Tywin posted:The Soviet spies was pretty drat good before that as well, I mean just look how they completely infiltrated the Manhattan project. However one thing I wonder is why the Nazis were so laughably incompetent when it came to spying, was it because Canaris opposed Hitler or were there any other reason? Weren't they pretty brutally effective at internal security, at least? Many of their external operations were comically ineffective, but the same was true for the allies as far as I know.
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Nov 21, 2012 19:08
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Magni posted:Mixed bag. Anything from horrible failures to outstanding successes. One lasting legacy is that of a Luftwaffe corporal, Hans-Joachim Scharff. Guy basically wrote the book on interrogation and his methods are taught the world over even today. Well, the SOE operation in the Netherlands was one of the examples of a "comically ineffective" operation by the Allies. It's weird, because there were certainly Nazi sympathizers in both England and the US, and yet they were unable to convert that into a significant intellegence asset. I guess the reason is that it takes many years of non-aggression to cultivate that sort of asset; it's probably difficult to do when you're actively fighting the people whose government you're trying to infiltrate.
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Nov 22, 2012 02:19
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General China posted:The only thing the UK had to do to improve on the German strategy was shoot down the bombers. Which they did, so by copying german tactics for invading a hostile airspace they won. That was the key difference- the raf were creating a hostile air space. As far as bombing goes, the British and the Americans really definitely developing their own tactics after the failure of the Blitz. "Hit them with thousands of bombers" seems to have been the basic conclusion, which is something the Germans weren't able to come up with given their industrial limitations.
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Dec 1, 2012 01:35
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Retarded Pimp posted:So, the Soviets steamroll in from the north then. That was pretty much a given. Wasn't the US gonna provide them with transports even?
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Dec 5, 2012 01:14
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Except the Japanese fleet basically tried to do what Nelson did... after all, it worked for him! Of course, the Spanish/French fleet at Trafalgar wasn't nearly as co-ordinated as the American fleet was... and their radar and fire-control systems were pretty crap, too.
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Dec 13, 2012 06:52
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:There was also that little skirmish in the waters around Actium a while back. That was pretty important too IIRC. Well, insofar as we have a month named "August" and not "Anthony" it was important. But it wouldn't have changed the grand scheme of history too much, the Roman empire would have had a different set of dudes at the head. Whereas with Salamis or Lepanto or Trafalgar, if the winning side had lost a totally different empire would have been established.
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Dec 13, 2012 18:41
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SeanBeansShako posted:Only way to win? crash your plane into the Irish sea and hope you get picked up by the Irish coast guard. There was the rookie pilot who either accidentally or "accidentally" got his directions mixed up and landed his plane (with a top-secret prototype radar) in an English airfield.
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Dec 15, 2012 04:22
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quote:Qutuz responded, however, by killing the envoys and displaying their heads on Bab Zuweila, one of the gates of Cairo. To be fair to Hulagu (that destroyer of cities and ravager of civilizations, the villain that shattered the great Muslim empires, who ruined Mesopotamia and killed millions), he had to return to Mongolia with most of his army to elect a new Khan. The same thing happened with Sobedai in Europe. Ain Jalut was only a fraction of the army. After the new Khan (Kublai) was elected, the decision was made to focus on ravaging China instead of the lands to the far west.
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Dec 27, 2012 17:38
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Baron Porkface posted:Why was Georgia chosen as the place to attack in the middle of the Civil War? Sherman/Grant had the choice of any Confederate state after securing Tennessee, and North Carolina stands out for two reasons. Atlanta was the second biggest city and industrial center left in the Confederacy (New Orleans having fallen in 1862), taking it would cripple the Confederacy. Also, Sherman's initial orders were to destroy Johnson's army, it wasn't until Atlanta fell that he decided to take the war to the interior. I'm not too familiar with the Appalachian "Mountains", being from the west, but it probably would have been difficult to move an army through them to North Carolina. The railroad went from Chattanooga to Atlanta, so that was the best route for supplies to take during the Atlanta campaign. Afterwards, during the march to the sea, the fact that there were so many resources left in Georgia was an incentive, since the army was going to need to "live off the land" to stay together.
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Dec 29, 2012 18:07
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:I've seen no evidence for a risk of troops getting "hopelessly" lost in expeditions where a division of forces was not only good, it was necessary. In El Victorial Gutierre Diaz de Gamez writes about men dispatched from galleys to ravage the Tunisian coast, and though they could not find the town they were looking for (Diaz attributes this to divine intervention) they had no trouble returning to the ships. The only time men get really lost is when they are split up not into groups but as individuals. Louis VI's flight from Brémule ended with him relying on a Norman peasant to lead him back to Andelys. March divided and fight concentrated is an old maxim. Although one of the mysteries surrounding Manzikert is that Emperor Diogenes sent a chunk of his forces off to chase away some Turkish raiders and they just disappeared from the chronicles. Did they desert? Get ambushed? Get lost? Nobody really knows, except they missed out on the big battle.
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Jan 6, 2013 01:17
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Fizzil posted:Wasn't it really just a gigantic bridge built with ship bits? once the persian fleet protecting it was defeated at salamis they abandoned it. This same tactic was apparently used by the greeks to besiege a carthaginian or phoenician city if i recall, but instead of ships they literally moved earth to create a land bridge. Which was pretty crazy but i guess thats how you attack a strongpoint facing the sea Yeah, Darius built a bridge of boats across the Bosphorus during the Scythian campaign (which had to be dismantled post-haste once Darius and most (but not all) of the army was across to prevent the Scythians from following... Xerxes was the one that had his first bridge destroyed by a storm and responded by beheading the engineers and whipping the ocean into submission before building the second bridge (at least according to Herodotus). Basically they tied boats together with thick cables and then built a roadbed over the tops to march the army across. Alexander built the land bridge to Tyre during his conquest of Persia.
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Jan 15, 2013 03:01
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Mans posted:Are there any good examples of guerrila warfare working before the 19th century? Napoleon in Spain was the first i can recall, but that's mainly because Spain wasn't the main focus of the war, being the route to Portugal where the Anglo-Portuguese troops fought as a regular standard force. When it came to kick the French out it was indeed necessary to use standard army tactics so i guess that doesn't count as a ~~true~~ guerrila win technically. When the Persians invaded Scythia, the Scythians burned the fields, poisoned the wells, and harassed the army without ever having a stand-up fight. Eventually they turned to retreat and were chopped up piecemeal all the way back to the Hellespont. Chinese expeditions into the northern steppes suffered similar fates (with the occasional disasterous massacre). Dunno if that's what you'd call a guerilla war, since they were nomadic tribes avoiding battle, but there are quite a few ancient examples of armies using these tactics to defeat a conventional force. I mean, part of the issue is that the classic example of a guerrila is a civilian with a gun that hides amongst the civilian population, because without access to weapons that are easy to use, it is hard to really inflict casualties on a professional army. Other than by starving them or denying them supplies.
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Jan 17, 2013 00:27
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Xiahou Dun posted:Didn't they also get some pretty sweet trade deals with the package, and something about allowing people in Louisiana and other French holdings some amount of freedom to move through the colonies? I have hazy memories of this. The French didn't get Louisiana (and points north) until they picked it up off the Spanish in 1800 during Napoleon's occupation of Spain. In fact, even though Spain and the US were allied at the end of the Revolutionary war, they quickly began squabbling over just where the borders were and whether or not the US could use the Mississippi river. Fortunately, the Louisiana Purchase settled that question for good, although the Florida border issues weren't fully resolved until 1819.
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Jan 18, 2013 05:47
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Throatwarbler posted:According the Anthony Beevor's Normandy which I am reading now, Rommel had already concluded with a number of other officers on the Western front that the war was lost and that the only way out was to depose Hitler and conclude a separate peace with the Western allies. He had sounded out many of the commanders in the west and gained their support, with the idea that Rommel himself would be the only person that can lead the Army after Hitler is deposed. This is a separate but parallel plot with that other one carried out by Tom Cruise. My understanding from "The Longest Day" was that the officer's plot approached Rommel and said, "Hey, we're gonna kill Hitler, you want in?" And he was basically "No, but you go for it." Hitler, naturally, wasn't too happy about Rommel's failure to narc on the plotters and suspected him of more, so... Cornelius Ryan said that Rommel's aides were really loyal to him and after the war, tried to protect his repuatation as much as possible; so stories like "he was totes gonna overthrow Hitler" and "he saw D-Day coming" are probably the result of their exaggerations.
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Jan 26, 2013 18:05
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Amused to Death posted:Do they say he basically knew the exact date it was going to happen, or just in general? Because if it's in general, I have to think just about every German general could make a good assumption that the allies were going to try to a landing sometime during the warm months of 1944. Rommel fired off about half a dozen predictions of the specific date; one of them happened to be right, but given that on June 5th-7th he scheduled training exercises for the officers and then left the front to visit his wife, when the time came he was banking on the wrong prediction.
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Jan 26, 2013 18:54
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the JJ posted:Umm... the Spartans refused to build walls? Not so, they wanted to abandon Athens and the rest of Greece and build a wall across the ithmus during the second Persian invasion. It was more that they didn't need walls, being landlocked in rugged terrain. While the Athenians did need walls. Hence Themistocles' amusing deception during the rebuilding of Athens.
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Jan 30, 2013 01:53
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Grand Prize Winner posted:I thought when the yeomen got called out the strikers ended up breaking, at least in British labor disputes.  Call out the legions, seal the streets and start stabbing. Better hope that the legions remain loyal. During the uneasy occupation of Jerusalem, the Romans had to murder a few thousand rioters every so often to keep order. Then during the zealot riots in Alexandria, apparently an entire section of the city was burned down during the suppression. And the Nikas riots, well, they sealed up the Hippodrome and didn't let anyone out. Then during the short reign of Michael V an angry mob dragged him out of the palace and mutilated him. Mostly because the household guards were like, "Welp, they seem determined and the boss is kind of an rear end in a top hat". sullat fucked around with this message at 06:29 on Feb 2, 2013 |
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Feb 2, 2013 06:19
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gohuskies posted:This is a great link, I love reading about emergencies at sea. Have you read about this one? It's pretty nifty; madness, mutiny, murder and shipwreck in uncharted waters. There's also a book about it, it's a good one.
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Mar 6, 2013 06:44
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MacArthur didn't believe that the Chinese would invade because he "understood the Oriental mind" and knew that they ultimately wouldn't want to stand up to the might of the American army. He also ignored army intelligence, which was saying, "hey, there's an awful lot of Chinese soldiers in North Korea", army strategists who were saying "just stop at the bottleneck north of Pyongyang, those mountains are a bitch and winter's coming and we've just captured 3/4ths of the Korean population and industry" and also the Chinese themselves, who were saying (via the Indian ambassador) "we really really don't want the Americans on our border and we're gonna move to stop that if they keep advancing". But no, MacArthur just had to conquer Korea to use it (and Taiwan) as springboards to bring democracy and christianity back to China. Mind you, this is all according to Halberstam, who seemed to have an axe to grind with MacArthur. What is certainly clear was that MacArthur let his ego, his racism and his hatred of the Commies override his judgment which led to one of the biggest disasters for American arms since the ACW.
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Mar 19, 2013 19:02
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Saint Celestine posted:How so? Betting your house on lucky number 7 coming up in roulette doesn't make you a financial genius... it just makes you lucky. Same with Inchon; it had the potential to be a clusterfuck because it was a terrible place to make an amphibious landing. The Chinese, the Soviets, the press corps all knew MacArthur was landing there. The Soviets and Chinese warned the North Koreans that it was gonna happen and how to avert it. The only person who didn't believe it was Kim Jong Sun, for the basic reason that he didn't think anyone would be stupid enough to try to land there.
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Mar 20, 2013 01:51
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Konstantin posted:Keep in mind that the process would have been very slow though. I remember hearing that there probably would still have been slaves in the 20th century had slavery been allowed to 'naturally' die out. There are still slaves in the 21st century, so yeah, it would have taken forever. As in, never.
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Apr 26, 2013 03:15
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Raenir Salazar posted:Not just that but the Soviet Army could operate under technical and logistical limitations that would've crippled any Western military. The tsarista poley in particular. Infantry who only had their rifles and their turnips who could keep going and keep marching and shrug off the worst conditions, as an organization there are times being simply used to not having the same toys as other armies is just plain useful in a pinch. Well, not having "toys" such as radios, encyption, artillery support, functional anti-tank weapons, and suchlike does mean that you take a lot more casualties than you might otherwise.
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May 10, 2013 05:15
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SeanBeansShako posted:It also was a big PR stunt associated with the newly established post Revolutionary government, as they sent quite a few scholars, artists and scientists with Napoleons men to study Egyptian history and the country in general which to Western European eyes always been a big mystery since the fall of the Roman Empire. Well, it was helpful to Napoleon since he got a chance to practice the ancient art of leaving behind his army to get wiped out while he buggered off to collect the glory and promotions.
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May 21, 2013 03:41
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Well, that is pretty much the plot of a Tom Clancy novel. So read that if you want to hear about how Russia could join NATO to hold off the Asiatic hordes.
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May 25, 2013 17:15
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Does Clancy even write his own books anymore? I'm sure he has software that can do it. Just plug in [latest Fox News threat] and [bland American name] and it writes itself, downloading necessary details from military databases and Glen Beck's conspiracy theories.
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May 25, 2013 17:53
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Grand Prize Winner posted:I've heard that GoT has a lot in common with the Wars of the Roses. Which side ended up with more dragons, then Lancastrians or the Yorkists? The tudors. One of them even married a witch. sullat fucked around with this message at 06:26 on May 27, 2013 |
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May 27, 2013 05:40
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Is there any go to book or series of books covering the entirety of the Napoleonic Wars? The Patrick O'Brian novels start in, I think, 1803 and go until the end. Of course, the Napoleonic Wars is sort of what's going on in the background, but still, it's a good series.
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May 29, 2013 03:27
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Lord Tywin posted:The really hilarious thing was how the nationalists framed the civil war as a new Reconquista while they were the ones who used a shitload of Muslim troops who committed various atrocities. The atrocities weren't committed by the troops because they were Morrocan, they were planned and executed from the top down as an atempt to purge the leftists (and suspected leftists) from the body politic. Which is kind of exactly like tthe end of the reconquista.
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Jun 6, 2013 23:21
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Nah, that sounds about right. As of Dec. 6th, the Japanese and the US were still in the middle of diplomatic talks as well. The notion that the diplomatic talks were a façade designed to lull the US into a false sense of security would have been outlandish, even bizarre to US officials. And yet that appears to have been the case.
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Jul 5, 2013 05:49
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