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my dad posted:Serious question: What's the most effective shield shape? Samuel L. Jackson PrinceRandom posted:War is really depressing. Does it ever get depressing reading about real people killing real people? Yes. Although as a military historian I like to think that writing about this stuff might make a difference in whether there's more or less of it in the future.
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Nov 14, 2013 04:07
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Also, according to Hew Strachan when I spoke to him, any time Keegan talks about Clausewitz or WWI. lmao This was my Ph.D advisor's take on Keegan too, but especially whenever he talked about naval warfare. Someone else I think described Keegan as a man who had never read a primary source in his life. As for songs, I think my favorites are two from the Civil War: The first is a Union "gently caress you" to the Southern song "Bonnie Blue Flag": quote:REPLY TO "THE BONNIE BLUE FLAG" [Also known as The Stripes and Stars] The second one was popular with German-American immigrants, who were often some of the most patriotic soldiers the North had even if they couldn't speak English all that well. quote:I GOES TO FIGHT MIT SIGEL Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Nov 15, 2013 |
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Nov 15, 2013 00:12
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Found a recording of "I Goes to Fight mit Sigel": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUSJA-vtg_s
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Nov 15, 2013 01:56
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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:Is The Mitrokhin Archive, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, a reliable book? I'm 100 pages into it and it has parts that are unbelievably farcical, like the English plot to publicly de-pants and humiliate Lenin. Much of the material is supposedly accurate although there's plenty of reputable scholars who have their doubts such as Amy Knight, although most of their doubts are based on the supposed ironclad security within Soviet intelligence. So really it depends on how much you believe in the KGB etc being hypervigilant in document security measures. Considering things like Bradley Manning walking out with thousands of secret documents on a loving fake burned Lady Gaga CD, I have my doubts the Soviets didn't have equally boneheaded lapses in security.
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Nov 23, 2013 23:25
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a travelling HEGEL posted:The Italian Wars begin. Gunpowder artillery, mother fuckers Constantinople would like a word in your ear. Also Orleans and Calais. And Crecy. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Nov 29, 2013 |
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Nov 29, 2013 21:25
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:What civilization had the world's first standing professional tank destroyer? Imperial Germany. Because they were the only ones who needed such a thing in 1916. It was a guy with a special bullet for his Mauser. He was replaced by a guy with a big rifle. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Dec 1, 2013 |
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Dec 1, 2013 08:35
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tweekinator posted:I was fairly skeptical of his "And then Roger and 150 dudes beat an army of 35,000!", but thank you for the heads up about his tendency. When it comes to medieval and classical battles of this sort, I almost always assume the numbers claimed in primary accounts are overstated by anywhere from 2/3s to 9/10s, sometimes even more.
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Dec 6, 2013 18:00
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Hogge Wild posted:Can a Polish Hussar achieve a take off if you put him on a conveyor belt? Only if Hitler is gay but not black.
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Dec 7, 2013 04:59
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I am utterly shocked that a man like this would spend his life writing creepy alternate history books involving horrible rape and genocide.
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Dec 7, 2013 07:21
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Godholio posted:Can't blame a guy for figuring out how to turn history into money. I can and I will. Anything Ferguson wrote about British foreign policy and especially Sir Edward Grey being the mastermind of an Anglo-German showdown is complete and utter bullshit, and his reading of the Cabinet meeting in August 1911 is almost certainly ludicrously wrong. I only add the "almost certainly" caveat because I haven't actually read Ferguson's account of that meeting, just heard what was said about it by others.
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Dec 28, 2013 02:48
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gradenko_2000 posted:Holy poo poo what It's not really fair to call Jackie Fisher a warmonger. If anything he understood deterrence theory before the term was coined. Not that I'd want him or anyone from that era in charge of nuclear weapons 
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Dec 29, 2013 01:54
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sullat posted:They were oral histories, eventually recorded in Greek. The modern names for them are ”the Iliad” and ”The Odyssey”. This isn't even close to being true.
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Jan 6, 2014 12:02
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:As an aside, here's an interesting article on Tours. Seems sound to me. http://deremilitari.org/2013/09/the-battle-of-tours-poitiers-revisited/ There's some problems with their description of the Visigothic "kings" that followed Roderic (there's no actual proof Achila II was related to Witiza, much less that he was his son, although there's plenty of reason to think they may have been from the same power bloc, i.e. they were both opposed to Roderic), but that's only a minor issue. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 11:28 on Jan 20, 2014 |
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Jan 20, 2014 11:23
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DerLeo posted:The First World War was traumatic enough to scar the art and literature of Europe right up until a worse war came along and pretty much made pacifism a mainstream political movement, so I'm feeling that there's a bit of nostalgia for the GOOD OLD DAYS OF EMPIRE At least in England, a lot of that art and literature was written by upper class sons of privilege who'd spent the prewar years listening to nothing more violent than their servants cutting meat in the kitchens of their manor houses. Except when shooting partridges or going on fox hunts, I suppose. Meanwhile, the "lower classes" who lived four families to a tiny tenement house in the East End with holes the floor and no heating beyond burnt newspapers found trench warfare much less traumatic for some reason.
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Jan 23, 2014 20:47
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here.
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:This is absurd. When it rains in London, it doesn't come with shells I said less traumatic, not a happy puppy parade. Also I don't think either of you realize just how lovely housing for the poor and working class was in prewar Britain. Like those stories about holes in the floor are from government reports.
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Jan 23, 2014 22:51
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a travelling HEGEL posted:Physical privation and facing down the immediate prospect of getting killed aren't the same thing. Oh that's certainly possible, and I didn't claim only the rich suffered (which anyone who read All Quiet on the Western Front in high school would know is laughable). Just that, at least in the British case, the war novels and poems that make up "war literature" is almost entirely about officers suffering horrible things while the "lower ranks" are often described as not being nearly as effected by it all.
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Jan 23, 2014 23:01
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Retarded Pimp posted:"Frankly I had enjoyed the war." There's also the less-remembered Walter "Tich" Cowan, a First World War RN flag officer who joined a Commando unit in World War Two (in his seventies) and was captured by the Italians while trying to fight a tank with his service revolver.
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Jan 24, 2014 04:28
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a travelling HEGEL posted:Yeah, because that's what makes you win. The flashy poo poo is all on top--beneath it is the Ottoman government itemizing pillowcases and spoons. There's also multiple ways of doing logistics badly. I'll have to do an effortpost one of these days about how Jackie Fisher saved the Royal millions of pounds by actually paying attention to what kind of pillowcases and spoons were being bought by the Admiralty.
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Jan 25, 2014 01:16
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meatbag posted:The Royal Navy pre-Fisher is hilarious. "Gunnery training? But that will make our ships dirty! Now there's another effortpost right here, debunking the legend that before Fisher came the RN was a bunch of circlejerking clowns.
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Jan 25, 2014 12:17
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meatbag posted:I'm not saying they were the Keystone Kaptains, but not having to fight an actual war for almost a century sure didn't lend itself to producing an efficient force. Yes, they aren't particularly good if you're a specialist on the period, considering how much important research the author ignored.
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Jan 25, 2014 20:52
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Fangz posted:Was there any popular military fiction in the pre-modern age? King Arthur.
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Jan 25, 2014 22:33
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brozozo posted:I'm also curious in hearing about Massie's shortcomings. I've read Dreadnought, and I've been interested in reading Castles of Steel as well. Actually if you're looking for a general history of the period aimed at non-experts Massie is about the best you'll be able to find. I've just been working on a graduate-level thesis for so long I'm still in "my sources can beat up your sources" mode. Marder on the other hand is excellent but you have to be careful with some of his claims because he took the griping and complaining of some particularly disaffected officers way too seriously (gently caress Herbert Richmond).
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Jan 28, 2014 07:19
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Yeah, he wrote one. It's also wrong in every important respect.  WARNING: BIG WALL OF TEXT I can't give a blow by blow Fisking of Ferguson's idiotic swill because my library is currently boxed up in my garage and I haven't actually read The Pity of War, but I'm familiar enough with the main thrust of it all that I can safely describe it as garbage. OK, first of all he totally ignores the naval rivalry between Britain and Germany before the First World War. If a student turned in a paper to me on the origins of the First World War and omitted this, I would fail them immediately. German sailors drank regular toasts lustily hoping for Der Tag when the High Seas Fleet would sortie and defeat the British battle fleet in a reverse Trafalgar in the North Sea. The Kaiser was obsessed with sea power. Admiral Tirpitz was one of the key men who shaped German history as a whole in the two decades before August 1914. The German Army Command and the other hawks during the July Crisis went through quite a bit of trouble to give crucial mobilizing orders and such like when the Wilhelm and the fleet were on a cruise in Norwegian waters, because they thought Tirpitz and the Kaiser would want to hold off on military action out of fear of the superior strength of the Royal Navy (irony or ironies, the service which had done the most to damage Anglo-German relations had a better understanding of British feelings than anyone else). Second of all, Ferguson pins the whole of the collapse of Anglo-German relations on Sir Edward Grey, the Liberal Foreign Secretary, claiming he led a cabal to bring Britain around into opposition to Germany because Reasons (and because he was from a political party that Ferguson hates). This is preposterous. When he first took over as Foreign Secretary, he was interested in better relations with Germany, or at least trying to find common ground. Want proof, here's an excerpt from a January 1906 letter from Grey to the Prime Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, discussing British actions during the recent Algeciras Crisis: Sir Edward Grey to Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 9 January 1906, Add MS 41218, f. 49-50, Campbell-Bannerman MSS, British Library posted:In more than one part of the world I find ... that Germany is feeling after a coaling station in a port. Everywhere we block this. I am not an expert in naval strategy, but I doubt whether it is vy important ... to prevent Germany getting ports at a distance from her base; and the moment may come when timely admission, that it is not a cardinal object of British policy to prevent her having such a port, may have great pacific effect. That sure sounds like a man doing all he can to poison the Anglo-German diplomatic well, doesn't it? Never mind that in the fallout from Wilhelm's congratulatory telegram to Paul Kruger after the Boers defeated the Jameson Raid had led to such a crisis between Germany and Britain that a "Flying Squadron" of warships had been assembled in case the balloon went up. Never mind that since at least 1903 the Admiralty had been drawing up potential operational plans for a war with the German Navy. Never mind that Tirpitz mentioned the Royal Navy by name in his own memoranda leading up to the devising of the German Navy Laws in 1898. Never mind all that, Sir Edward Grey is obviously the villain of the story. I mean, he had to be, he was a Liberal. Third of all, Ferguson (I believe) interprets a meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence in August 1911 (amidst another Moroccan Crisis, the Agadir Incident) as being the point where the sinister cabal of evil Liberal politicians decided they would throw in with France in a continental war and destroy the Empire in the process. Bull loving poo poo. I've read the minutes of that conference and nothing of the sort happened. Hell, here's my own description of events taken direct from my own loving Ph.D thesis. Footnotes are missing, sorry. Me posted:Agadir OK, so that's how the conference went down. It's important to note that at no point did the C.I.D. make a firm decision on committing the B.E.F. to the continent. In fact Asquith and his Cabinet wouldn't make a final decision until after the First World War had begun. However, the real significance of this conference is that the Admiralty presented what looked like a suicidal proposal (whether it was or not can be argued) while the Army's plan as presented had a professional polish and was expounded on expertly by General Wilson. The Navy in effect ceded their previous primacy in terms of war strategy. From this moment on the British Army had established that they would pursue a strategic policy completely separate from what the Royal Navy had planned. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't actually read the loving conference minutes at the National Archives in Kew. Which is a shame as there's only 14 or 15 pages of them to read. There's a lot more, including how his fingering Sir Edward Grey as the villain is basically just filing the serial numbers off a similar condemnation of Winston Churchill for not negotiating peace with Hitler in late 1940, which would somehow magically have saved the empire because, essentially, Hitler would've killed off the Soviet Union and then Germany and Britain could've fended off the monster that destroyed the Empire: the United States. So yeah, Niall Ferguson is a flatulent, pinheaded, morally bankrupt imbecile and HEGEL has a friend's sister who dated him (while he was married!) and ended up throwing his clothes [amongst other things] into the street from Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Jan 31, 2014 |
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Jan 31, 2014 04:55
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a travelling HEGEL posted:That was her sister, but yes. I want to shake that lady's hand and buy her a drink.
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Jan 31, 2014 05:06
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Isn't Dan Carlin citing Neil Ferguson in his podcasts on WWI? That isn't good. Oh great, now my eyelid is twitching spasmodically.
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Feb 4, 2014 01:01
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I love how everyone thinks I got shouted out of D&D when I never posted there much in the first place. Anyway, here's some neat photos of Royal Navy aerial experimentation in 1908. That boxy thing is a manned kite. Click for big.  
Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Feb 16, 2014 |
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Feb 16, 2014 08:06
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Raskolnikov38 posted:I'm no naval expert but the answer is math. Once you have the shell velocity, your speed and heading, estimated path of the target, estimated target speed and distance you can throw that into some equations and get a firing solution. I'd assume gunners would have tables of numbers to consult so as to get the calculations done quickly before the invention of the fire control computer. Actually they mostly didn't need huge tables of numbers (though such things existed) because by the time fighting ranges became that long there were mechanical computers available to the gunnery officers. There was a huge amount of mathematics involved in training gunnery officers, however. Something on the order of the prerequisites for astronomy or physics majors in college.
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Feb 16, 2014 09:00
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grover posted:What was the hit % in WWI at long ranges anyhow, wasn't it something abysmally low, like well less than 1%? The hit %s I've seen that include engagements at more moderate ranges are still all in the low single-digits. Keep this in mind and imagine how bad their shooting would've been without the fire control equipment.
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Feb 16, 2014 18:29
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brozozo posted:Can anyone tell me about the development of air warfare before and during World War I? That's a pretty broad question. Is there anything specific you'd like to know?
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Feb 20, 2014 06:19
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Koramei posted:Huh I have mixed feelings about this. One of them would have only been like 18/19 at the time. Should this live with them 70 years later? (maybe it should?) They were guards at loving Auschwitz, not some twelve year olds tossed a Panzerfaust each and told to march off to the Seelow Heights. Of course it should live with them.
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Feb 21, 2014 08:37
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PittTheElder posted:I don't know if I buy that, at least without an explanation of the selection process for said guards. If they were just random conscripts that were getting posted to prison camp duty, then I don't see a huge difference between them and some kid at Seelow. If that's the case they should be able to prove it. Seriously, it's literally Auschwitz. Why would you possibly expect there to be a statue of limitations on that poo poo?
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Feb 21, 2014 08:52
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I will Dreadnought all over you if you try that.
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Feb 27, 2014 09:28
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Tooze is exceptionally good.cafel posted:But really, how would the war have changed if the Americans had upgunned the Sherman with laser cannons? General Patton would've died of ecstasy before he could command the Third Army. This would've been a huge blow to the Allies.
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Feb 27, 2014 11:55
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Fangz posted:If your flagship is not up in the front, how would you lead (literally) with it? Middle of the line, communicating via signal flags. That way whichever way your fleet deploys you'll be in the same place in the line. gradenko_2000 posted:That's pretty much it, yes. One of David Beatty's failings was apparently that he did not meet the Admiral (the name escapes me) of the squadron of Queen Elizabeth-class super-Dreadnoughts when he took command prior to the Battle of Jutland, and that the Admiral's lack of understanding with Beatty's preferred doctrine and manner of fighting contributed to the miscommunications during the actual battle. The Admiral that Beatty hosed over was Hugh Evan-Thomas of the Fifth Battle Squadron. What's truly sad about the whole situation is that Beatty had been fighting for months to get the Fifth put under his authority, then he couldn't even be bothered to talk to its commander when he got his wish. Of course the idea that if he had talked to Evan-Thomas before Jutland it might've saved many of Beatty's ships is most likely an exaggeration. The Battlecruiser Fleet's magazine safety practices were so poor that it was likely they would've been lost anyway no matter what Evan-Thomas had done. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Feb 27, 2014 |
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Feb 27, 2014 23:18
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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:How long did ramming remain a viable tactic? War of the Worlds has a chapter where a naval ram destroys three Martian tripods, and I figure it was in popular culture, if not reality, the most powerful weapon on Earth. Not very long, although it's often forgotten that the technology of the 1860s-70s made it appealing to more than just armchair admirals. The best way to sink a ship is to let water in, and heavy guns of the era were cumbersome and slow to reload (the self-propelled torpedo wouldn't be a practical weapon until the late 1870s), so ramming had an elegant simplicity to it that overrode the objections.
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Feb 27, 2014 23:28
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Zorak of Michigan posted:People have already talked about Castles of Steel, which I enjoyed, but Andrew Gordon's The Rules of the Game digs deeper into the culture of the RN and the factors that drove the British into the weird tactical cul-de-sac they were in during WWI. Some it makes one rather less sympathetic to the personalities involved, but it also drives home that it took only a few decades to overturn centuries of tradition. A sailor from 1612 would have felt more at home in the navy of 1812 than a sailor of 1880 in the navy of 1910. Rules of the Game is fairly unreliable about the personalities involved. The ideal that most naval officers pre-1914 bullheaded reactionaries is one of the most destructive bits of misinformation told about the prewar Royal Navy. Basically Andrew Gordon constructed an inaccurate strawman version of the prewar RN based on the complaints of some egotistical wannabe reformers who thought they were the smartest people in the room despite never actually holding commands with anything close to the same responsibility as the people they criticized.
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Feb 28, 2014 04:00
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The Merry Marauder posted:3" was acceptable for the very brief period (certainly over before WWI began) where weak torpedo boats were doctrinally expected to attack separately from the rest of a force. Otherwise, unshielded, unprotected guns would be...difficult to work with the main batteries firing, not to mention hauling shells to the initially absurd (in context) positions of the 12 pounders. The Royal Navy's anti-torpedo boat armament (secondary armament isn't really the correct term for these guns, for reasons that I can expound on ad nauseum but which would just bloat up this post) choices prior to 1914 were something of a clusterfuck to say the least. Fisher picked the 12 pounder for the Dreadnought and the Invincibles because that was what the most modern British destroyers were using at the time. Fair enough. Problem was, destroyers were getting bigger and by 1906, when Dreadnought began her trials, the 12 pounder was rather anemic (Also the early Dreadnoughts had their anti-torpedo battery pretty poorly located, mostly on top of the main turrets. Reasonable if you're expecting to beat off an enemy flotilla operating by itself, useless in a fleet action because of what the blast from the main guns would do to the gun crews on the turret roofs). So they upgraded to the 4 incher. Again, fair enough. Then in 1911 it's decided to upgrade again to the 6 inch gun, which for safety's sake will be put in armored casements to keep the gun crews from getting wiped out in a fleet action (in fact there's an argument that the casemates made things worse by creating a long enclosed gallery that could see all the guns knocked out by one sufficiently damaging hit like the Malaya suffered at Jutland). Problem was that the forward-most casemates ended up getting flooded out in anything other than a glassy sea and the 6 inch shell turned out to be too heavy for easy manual reloading. After World War One things got even worse because unlike the U.S. Navy the British could never be bothered to come up with a single dual-purpose medium gun like the American 5"/38. The closest they came was the 5.25", but the mounting used for that weapon was hideously complex and hard to get working correctly. British destroyers and other ships of the 1930s and 40s ended up saddled with a bewildering variety of 4", 4.5", 4.7", 5.5", and 5.25" guns that often couldn't share mountings or ammunition with other guns of the same caliber.
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Mar 25, 2014 06:12
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mllaneza posted:The Glorious' third escort was the immortal Glowworm. Detached from the carrier she was intercepted by the Admiral Hipper. Caught in gun range by a heavier ship the captain, Commander Roope, did the only thing he could. He attacked with torpedoes and then rammed the cruiser. His Victoria Cross was awarded based on testimony from the captain of the Hipper, passed on through the Red Cross. Here's a copy of his award: Glowworm wasn't an escort for the Glorious. She was sunk two months earlier during the opening movements of the invasion of Norway after becoming detached from a British task force based around the battlecruiser Renown. She ran into the Hipper and a bunch of other German ships as a result of the bad weather. Also I'm quite shocked people are repeating the old and inaccurate canard that the battlecruiser's main weakness was inadequate armoring. The British ships at Jutland were lost through completely inadequate magazine safety arrangements which were completely separate issues to the thickness (or lack thereof) of the armor they carried. That's not to mention Beatty's absolutely atrocious handling of his squadrons during Jutland (although thankfully that was actually mentioned). Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Mar 28, 2014 |
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Mar 28, 2014 04:21
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The Merry Marauder posted:Are you referring to my comment about British BC deck armor? I assure you that that has nothing whatever to do with (the charge ignitions at) Jutland, and simply reflect that such a level of horizontal protection is largely insufficient for the different threats in an environment featuring aircraft bombs and long range plunging fire. Specifically, a long-range duel with the 11"/52 SK C/28 poses a non-trivial threat. Arguably even after the 1930s adjustments to Refit and Repair's deck armor, obviously not a factor at the time the Panzerschiffe armament was selected. No, I wasn't. But since you bring it up, the thinness of the deck armor was a design flaw but it was pretty common across the board and not specific to the battlecruisers. At least in the pre-WW1 days plunging fire wasn't treated with the respect it deserved, designwise. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 05:38 on Mar 28, 2014 |
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Mar 28, 2014 05:34
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The explosions that destroyed the British battlecruisers at Jutland all started after shells penetrated their turrets, which were the most heavily armored parts of the ships. The subsequent explosions of those shells sent flash down into the magazines, setting off the cordite stored within. There were doors between the magazines and the turrets themselves that were meant to be sealed between firing to prevent flash traveling down to the magazines, but these and other precautions weren't in use at Jutland because they slowed down the turrets' rate of fire too much. The fact that the parts of the battlecruisers with the heaviest armoring were where the fatal hits happened pretty much shows how the idea that weak armor was to blame for their loss isn't terribly convincing. More deck/belt armor wouldn't have saved any of them because that armor wasn't where the fatal hits happened. Sources are pretty much anything written about Jutland in the last few decades. I can dig up more specific ones later, though.
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Mar 28, 2014 08:56
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