Zorak of Michigan posted:

In the first generation or two of dreadnoughts, designers thought that superfiring turrets would damage the turret in front of them or incapacitate the crew, so they mounted turrets offset to the side to get more fore- or aft-firing guns. Superfiring turrets proved workable, so all guns on subsequent ships were on the centerline, but amidships turrets still made sense in terms of (as other posters said) moar guns until the lessons of Jutland became apparent.

Panfilo posted:

Are torpedoes really that big of a threat to battleships? Aside from the Bismark's rudder getting jammed (more of a Golden BB type moment) and the sinking of the Royal Oak by a U boat that snuck in the harbor, I can't think of any other Battleships that were torpedoed and sunk by submarines. Even torpedo bombers took many direct hits to actually get the ship to capsize, and that's assuming the air group is coordinated enough to all attack it from one side. Yamato's efforts in dodging torpedoes ended up taking it completely out of the battle when they were attacking Taffy 3.

Acebuckeye13 posted:

What's actually sort of funny is that Japan might have done better if they hadn't attacked Pearl Harbor. Given the disparate skill level between the USN and the IJN in late 1941, it's entirely possible that an intact US Pacific Fleet would have sailed to defend the Philippines in the event of a war declaration and gotten its poo poo kicked in by the IJN in the decisive battle that the IJN had so desperately wanted, which may have even led to a negotiated peace. Instead, the remains of the US fleet didn't even attempt to save the Philippines, fought and wore down various elements of the IJN through the first half of '42, and wiped out the IJN's major striking force at Midway, all while chanting "Remember Pearl Harbor!" and refusing to negotiate. It's an interesting counterfactual, to say the least.

AdmiralSmeggins posted:

I'm fairly certain I clarified the child killer remark.

HEY GAL posted:

I've never been there, I just miss dry and open places with plenty of sunlight. I have no idea whether it's like New Mexico, it just looks a little like it.

Zorak of Michigan posted:

John Lundstrom's The First Team books go into tremendous detail about carrier combat in the early days of the Pacific Theater. If you want to obsess over the difference between the 4F4-3 and F4F-4, the cunning of the Thach Weave, and the training different nations gave their pilots in shooting, I recommend them.

Baron Porkface posted:

Everyone makes fun of AT-ATs, but what would have been the best way to attack Echo Base on Hoth?

Cyrano4747 posted:

Not to put words in Allpro's mouth, but I'm going to hazard a guess that it's because Hastings basically just rehashes other people's arguments in a package that's a bit more accessible to the average reader. A lot of his conclusions about German war guilt in 1914, for example, are basically just a tl;dr of Fritz Fischer's Germany's War Aims. Fischer's work was really, really instrumental in changing the way we look at the outbreak of WW1 and more or less turned the field on its head back in the 60s.

Basically he's an English public intellectual who does a lot of synthetic work for a general audience. The importance of that kind of work can be debated (I, personally, think it's pretty valuable and necessary) but it's more literature/journalism than history.

gradenko_2000 posted:

That's Niall Ferguson, possibly the worst historian I'm familiar with besides David "lets grossly inflate Dresden bombing deaths and also be a Holocaust denier" Irving

Saint Celestine posted:

Wait, whats wrong with Max Boot?

HEY GAL posted:

I thought Victor Davis Hanson was the low-rent Victor Davis Hanson.

Arrath posted:

Enjoy.

Frostwerks posted:

In a similar vein, anyone got anything interesting on the bantam battalions in the first one? Seems to make sense personally, all these hard rear end but tiny coal mining dudes getting excluded from duty simply because they couldn't meet the biometric requirements.

Tekopo posted:

General Reynolds was one of the more famous times when a Corps commander was killed as well.

HEY GAL posted:

Yeah, they wore makeup.

And seriously, the dude looks fine especially for a Hapsburg, but goons gotta goon.

Speaking of noses, this is Charles III of Spain, who was apparently really nice personally, but looked, well, Bourbon as all hell.


He was really cure as a kid though, before that schnozz took over.

Ensign Expendable posted:

Oh god what

Why

"Hentai for Stormfront" is an excellent description. Also the poor girls, they are not suited for working in a tank at all.

Edit: oh my god, it's literally Hitler.

HEY GAL posted:

I didn't ask her how big they were, but she's not a necromancer, they prefer "death technician," jeez.

Pornographic Memory posted:

Maybe not the right thread to ask but now I'm wondering, has anybody ever cucked a king and had his boy take the throne without people realizing it until it was too late, Game of Thrones-style?

HEY GAL posted:

Holy poo poo, I only realized this when I posted that example of early modern handwriting. This is from a report of a fight between a Fendrich and a college student in Wittemberg in 1631. Witnesses are listed. One of them is Claus von Taubens, Fendrich.


Claus von Taubens shows up again in the documents relating to that suicide I posted about last month. It's '54 and now he's an Oberst in Dresden. Congratulations, Claus!

uPen posted:

Not exactly what you're looking for but you might be interested in reading about Diocletian's edict on maximum prices for a snapshot of a 3rd-4th century economy.

Cyrano4747 posted:

edit: silly hair splitting, ignore.

HEY GAL posted:

How old is the Republic of San Marino?

Rodrigo Diaz posted:

Yo can people stop doing this? Either own up to using a Christian dating system or use another one. Pretending that it is inclusive just because it no longer explicitly mentions Christ (as if the way it was calculated is MERE COINCIDENCE) is intellectually cowardly.

Cyrano4747 posted:

Right now, at this moment, I love you.

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

Cyrano4747 posted:

Look at the evolution of the b25. Starts off a retry normal medium bomber dropping bunches of bombs from internal storage, ends up a gun and cannon based anti shipping monster with a loving crazy number of barrels projecting from the nose.

Same rough deal with the ju88 . Medium bomber -> cannon hauling tank killer.

bewbies posted:

I need a new book. Recommendations? Any period, any topic.

Arquinsiel posted:

I can't remember the guy's name, but I have a book by some prolific amateur historian on the campaigns to reach the rhine which was basically "gently caress Patton, dude extended the war by six months!" floating around somewhere. I'll try remember to post here again if I find it.

Arquinsiel posted:

Honestly that doesn't match my understanding of the Caen situation or of Patton as a general at all, but I've got nothing to back up my opinion but a well-worn armchair. If you want to call tying up 70% of the German units in the area so the American armies could go around to the south and outflank them leading into the Falaise Kessel that effectively destroyed the German military on the Western Front and caused a desperate scramble to find enough men to mount any form of defence "futile" then go right ahead, but it's a tough sell.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Reading about the Eastern Front, you do a get a sense of just how much the Soviets had to learn and how much they tangibly improved their planning, staff work, tactics, doctrine, etc over the next 4 years, and I do think it's worth considering that American commanders didn't quite have as long to sharpen their skills (the Pacific seems better at this).

For Monty though I have no excuse, dude was fighting since May 1940

PittTheElder posted:

It must. Although I imagine you have to be a little bit crazy to begin with to try and carry on the fight for more than a decade. It must have been heartbreaking for Onoda to learn that he had friends that had died literally for nothing, and perhaps killed for nothing as well.

Although now I'm curious, how much fighting could these guys really have been doing anyway? They can't have had much in the way of materiel, so I wouldn't be surprised if they spend most of their time just patrolling abandoned patches of mountains, and only coming down when they needed supplies.

Frostwerks posted:

Are there any good books on the Malta campaign.

Rodrigo Diaz posted:

nothing new there

Waroduce posted:

Where can I read about this?

All of it, but the bolded part must be a hell of a story

Cyrano4747 posted:

Broadly speaking? The 19th century, as part of the general Progressive push towards public health and generally improving society that you see people become really obsessed with during that time. You see temperance movements get started in England and the USA as early as the 1830s. Usually that's not really so much of a specifically anti-drink thing as it is a class based obsession with the health of the 'lower classes' and an attempt to save them from themselves. Basically middle and upper class people thought the working classes were a bunch of dirty drunks and wanted to educate them towards better lives. Later on you see them get really moralistic and just generally anti-drink, period.

I know the same broad pattern also existed in Germany. This is pretty late-century, but here's a good webpage on the general history of an association against the abuse of "spiritous alcohol" - the specificity makes me suspect that beer wasn't necessarily included, although I've never confirmed this for myself. It's all in German, unfortunately, but if you throw it through Google Translate it does a half decent job of it - http://www.ak-trinken.de/galerie/Deutscher-Verein-DVgMG.html

Cyrano4747 posted:

And if the US had spent less time loving around with heavy cruisers we could have gone into the war with more flat tops than we had.

Review of "The British Way in Warfare" by B. H. Liddell Hart posted:

This collection of revised and reprinted essays written from about 1932 onwards, is largely a history of the development of the British army in the years between the two wars. Its opening chapters, however, contain a survey of Britain's "traditional grand strategy" which is the most interesting and provocative part of the book and the most important at this moment. The battle for mechanization has been won, at any rate on paper, but the controversy over the Second Front is still raging, and Captain Liddell Hart's theories are extremely relevant to it.

What is the "traditional strategy" which we have abandoned and which Captain Liddell Hart implies that we should return to? Briefly, the strategy of indirect attack and limited aims. It was practised with great success in Britain’s predatory wars of the eighteenth century and only dropped in the decade before 1914, when Britain entered into an all-in alliance with France. Its technique is essentially commercial. You attack your enemy chiefly by means of blockade, privateering, and sea-borne "commando" raids. You avoid raising a mass army and leave the land fighting as far as possible to continental allies whom you keep going by means of subsidies. While your allies are doing your fighting for you you capture your enemy’s overseas trade and occupy his outlying colonies. At the first suitable moment you make peace, either retaining the territories you have captured or using them as bargaining counters. This was, in fact, Britain’s characteristic strategy for something like two hundred years, and the term perfide Albion was thoroughly justified except in so far as the behaviour of other States was morally similar. The wars of the eighteenth century were waged in a spirit so mercenary that the normal process is reversed, and they seem more "ideological" to posterity than they did to the people who fought in them. But in any case the “limited aims” strategy is not likely to be successful unless you are willing to betray your allies whenever it pays to do so.

In 1914-18, as is well known, we broke with our past, subordinated our strategy to that of an ally, and lost a million dead. Commenting on this Captain Liddell Hart says: "I can find in the conditions of the war no satisfying explanation of our change. . . . No fundamental cause for a change of historic policy seems to appear. Hence one is inclined to find it in a change of fashion — in the military mode of thought inspired by Clausewitz." Clausewitz is the evil genius of military thought. He taught, or is supposed to have taught, that the proper strategy is to attack your strongest enemy, that nothing is solved except by battle, and that "blood is the price of victory". Fascinated by this theory, Britain "made her navy a subsidiary weapon, and grasped the glittering sword of continental manufacture".

Now there is something unsatisfactory in tracing an historical change to an individual theorist, because a theory does not gain ground unless material conditions favour it. If Britain ceased, at any rate for four years, from being perfide Albion, there were deeper reasons than Sir Henry Wilson’s tie-up with the French General Staff. To begin with it is very doubtful whether our "traditional" strategy is workable any longer. In the past it really depended on the balance of power, more and more precarious from 1870 onwards, and on geographical advantages which modern technical developments have lessened. After 1890 Britain was no longer the only naval power, and moreover the whole scope of naval warfare had diminished. With the abandonment of sail navies became less mobile, the inland seas were inaccessible after the invention of the marine mine, and blockade lost part of its power owing to the science of substitutes and the mechanization of agriculture. After the rise of modern Germany it was hardly possible for us to dispense with European alliances, and one of the things allies are apt to insist on is that you do your fair share of the fighting. Money subsidies have no meaning when war involves the total effort of every belligerent nation.

The real shortcoming of these stimulating essays, however, lies in Captain Liddell Hart's unwillingness to admit that war has changed its character. "Limited aims" strategy implies that your enemy is very much the same kind of person as yourself; you want to get the better of him, but it is not necessary for your safety to annihilate him or even to interfere with his internal politics. These conditions existed in the eighteenth century and even in the later phases of the Napoleonic wars, but have disappeared in the atomized world in which we are now living. Writing in 1932 or thereabouts, Captain Liddell Hart is able to say, "Has there ever been such a thing as absolute war since nations ceased to exterminate or enslave the defeated?" The trouble is that they haven’t ceased. Slavery, which seemed as remote as cannibalism in 1932, is visibly returning in 1942, and in such circumstances it is impossible to wage the old style of limited profit-making war, intent only on "safeguarding British interests" and making peace at the first opportune moment. As Mussolini has truly said, democracy and totalitarianism cannot exist side by side. It is a curious fact, not much remarked on, that in the present war Britain has, up to date, waged the kind of war that Captain Liddell Hart advocates. We have fought no large-scale continental campaign, we have used up one ally after another, and we have acquired territories far larger and, potentially, far richer than those we have lost. Yet neither Captain Liddell Hart nor anyone else would argue from this that the war has gone well for us. Nobody advocates that we should simply wipe up the remaining French and Italian colonies and then make a negotiated peace with Germany because even the most ignorant person sees that such a peace would not be final. Our survival depends on the destruction of the present German political system, which implies the destruction of the German army. It is difficult not to feel that Clausewitz was right in teaching that "you must concentrate against the main enemy, who must be overthrown first", and that "the armed forces form the true objective", at least in any war where there is a genuine ideological issue.

To some extent Captain Liddell Hart's tactical theories are separable from his strategic ones, and here his prophecies have been all too well justified by events. No military writer in our time has done more to enlighten public opinion. But his justified war with the Blimps has perhaps overcoloured his judgement. The people who scoffed at mechanization and still labour to reduce military training to a routine of barking and stamping are also in favour of mass armies, frontal attacks, bayonet charges and, in general, meaningless bloodshed. Disgusted by the spectacle of Passchendaele, Captain Liddell Hart seems to have ended by believing that wars can be won on the defensive or without fighting — and even, indeed, that a war is better half-won than won outright. That holds good only when your enemy thinks likewise, a state of affairs which disappeared when Europe ceased to be ruled by an aristocracy.

Trin Tragula posted:

This is also another interesting day for the German navy; Scharnhost and Gneisenau appear in Tahiti, seeking to confiscate the coal stockpile in the port of Papeete. They sink an ancient French gunboat, some local ships, and then give the town a good shoeing, but the French gendarmes quickly set fire to the coal and deny it to them; Admiral von Spee exits stage left as soon as the situation becomes apparent. It's done his men's morale some good, but he's also let the Allies know where he is and where he might be going next. Meanwhile, Emden pays a stealthy visit to Madras, quickly and effectively shelling a number of petrol tanks and then leaving soon after the shore batteries start to answer back.

Pornographic Memory posted:

I'm pretty sure Churchill just loved random naval/amphibious sideshow operations for their own sake. Churchill probably never saw a stretch of coastline he didn't want to land some soldiers on.