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Fangz posted:Muskets seemed to take 20-30 seconds for a reload. It's important to understand that good quality muskets were actually fairly accurate within 100-200 yards and could be relied to hit a man-sized target with some actual time to aim them. The firing drills that allowed soldiers to fire this quickly did not allow for aimed fire. This could be seen with the light infantry during the Napoleonic Wars who were not firing in that style and could take time to aim their shots and could be deadly. The French pioneered their mass use and this contributed to some of their early success during the revolutionary period and beyond.
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Nov 14, 2013 21:28
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gradenko_2000 posted:I could be completely wrong on this, but I thought the lesson that the Entente needed to learn was to attack on a narrow front. Broad offensives would just get thrown back by the second echelon of the German defense-in-depth, but if you just took a small slice of trench and held on tight you could stay there. Was I getting it backwards? The Russians had their greatest offensive success when they launched a broad front attack with relatively light artillery preparation and used a good deal of infiltration to make things work. Most Russian offensives in WW1 were characterized by tiny frontages that provided a very easy way to deploy reserves. In WW1, the deployment of reserves is what really determined the static nature of a front, not the trenches.
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Nov 17, 2013 01:37
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veekie posted:Wouldn't marching people through a minefield be pretty terrible at actually clearing mines anyway? Sure a lot of people are likely to get brutally killed, but they're probably going to miss a lot of mines(the profile of feet on the ground compared to a roller), destroy morale rapidly, and give away any surprise factor you were going to have with the explosions. Yeah, the most common really expedient method of getting rid of mines i've seen in records is just the use of large amounts of artillery on known minefields.
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Nov 17, 2013 08:16
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Rabhadh posted:It just seems like an elegant solution to the "your sword is too drat thin Also, I imagine most people who were taking swords into battle didn't exactly get to pick and choose which kind they wanted, so it might not be that illogical that some impractical types would be there.
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Nov 17, 2013 14:40
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" argument, which is why I brought it up.
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Why were the Germans unable to capture Leningrad toward the end of 1941? Was it because all of the major resources were transferred to Operation Typhoon? That seems to always be a huge underrated turning point during the war. Obviously the Germans would have lost the war in the end anyway but I wouldn't be surprised if a couple A-bombs got dropped on Germany beforehand. Leningrad was strongly defended and static warfare was not something in which the Germans had a great advantage. I'm not sure having the Finns helping more directly would have been that much of an advantage, in fact it might have provoked an earlier offensive to knock Finland out.
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Nov 19, 2013 03:14
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INTJ Mastermind posted:They also did not expect Yorktown to be repaired so fast after the Battle of Coral Sea. The thing about Midway is that the forces involved mattered a lot less than blind luck, in that both sides had made a quick air strike on a poorly known target at Coral Sea and whiffed, sometimes badly(including a massive air attack on a single US fleet oiler), so I imagine Nagumo was hesitant to just drop everything and launch all his aircraft at a vaguely scouted target early in the morning, and once he didn't do that events basically overtook him and everything spiraled out of control.
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Nov 20, 2013 03:36
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There were a lot of foreigners involved with the Communists, Nationalists, and warlords in China who weren't affiliated with any particular government. Mao in particular didn't care for the Germans who went into CCP service because they tended not to be able to adapt to the CCP's situation.
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Nov 24, 2013 16:54
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Alchenar posted:No it's right there in the Geneva convention. They're not specially recruited to fight in conflicts. They aren't paid more than regular soldiers. They aren't separately organised to the regular army. The Ghurkas and the French Foreign Legion are historical peculiarities but they aren't mercenaries. I imagine the British wrote it specifically to protect their interests so that no one else could get foreign help in their armies.
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Nov 25, 2013 14:41
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While there were better ways to conduct infantry assaults in World War I, it's important to understand that half the reason no one could make serious movements is that the rail network in Western Europe was extremely good which allowed for very quick reinforcements in any sector. By comparison, in Russia, for example, the railroads were nowhere near as good so when someone won a battle locally, they could actually make moves before reinforcements appeared to plug any gap.
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Nov 27, 2013 00:16
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brozozo posted:That's true, but Great Britain was also able to exert a large amount of force over the Mediterranean itself. Napoleon's convoy to Egypt was able to evade Nelson but at great cost once the expeditionary force disembarked. Did France honestly believe such an expedition was worth the expenditure of men and ships? Was Napoleon really expected to conduct an overland campaign all the way from the Nile to India? Furthermore, hadn't the Ottoman Empire been France's nominal ally for centuries? If campaigning all the way to India had been the plan, couldn't France negotiate safe passage? I don't think the Egyptian expedition was made purely for strategic purposes.
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Nov 29, 2013 04:45
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It's also important to understand that the Seven Years War happened, and despite being attacked on all sides, Frederick managed to persevere and a miracle happened which saved Prussia. This inspired many, many men to come, from Napoleon(who had a very good chance to make it out with territorial gains in 1813) to Hitler. Ever since, many leaders have tried to fight to the end in the hope that alliances against them will fall apart for one reason or another.
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Dec 5, 2013 00:06
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gradenko_2000 posted:How bad was Britain's finances in the wake of WWI? Almost all of the countries that participated came out of WWI with massive war debts and had dumped the gold standard rules in order to keep their economy functioning. Britain, overall, was an intermediary. Most of the Entente countries had debts to the British, who themselves had considerable debts to the US. This had a considerable effect on the reparations negotiations after the war. These debts really didn't give anyone in particular a whole lot of power, and the French, for example, were able to negotiate a really good deal on the debt and only ended up paying 30 cents on the dollar, while the US was very tight-fisted and didn't give the British much reprieve.
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Dec 8, 2013 14:48
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Outside Dawg posted:Had the Confederate Army pressed its advantage after the First Battle of Manassas, or Bull Run (if you prefer), in all likelihood they could have indeed taken Washington, as the Federal Army was in complete disarray; The problem is, the Confederate Army was also in disarray after the battle, and this is a common motif of Civil War campaigns. The idea that either army would have done much in response to a victory at first Bull Run is probably overstating the functionality of the armies involved.
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Dec 9, 2013 23:06
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Taerkar posted:It's entirely the creation of one guy who thinks that the M113 is the pinnacle of military design. Everything that comes out of him is distilled crazy and horrible youtube videos. I mean, there's some legitimate controversy to be had with the DoD's extremely corrupt/nepotistic policies that have heavily favored massively overpriced systems. The M113 is a useful auxiliary vehicle, like the MT-LB, but it's just really odd how someone could look to it as the ultimate answer to everything. The real solution - bring back tankettes.
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Dec 11, 2013 17:53
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Ensign Expendable posted:The MT-LB is the ultimate platform, it has been used as a heavy tank, medium tank, light tank, AA SPG, and many more! (in movies) Come now, they couldn't be more versatile than Spanish M48s.
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Dec 11, 2013 18:08
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Raskolnikov38 posted:I though those were Chaffees not Pattons. Well, I was referring to Battle of the Bulge, where the Chaffees were Shermans, and the M48s were King Tigers. Arquinsiel posted:I still think nothing beats the M8 in Die Hard for sheer "what?" value. Turretless M8s were actually used because the crews found the lower profile and lighter weight to be more useful than the 37mm gun, a weapon that wasn't good at doing a whole lot. The crews took a bazooka instead. The one in Die Hard looks like it got the top covered.
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Dec 11, 2013 18:28
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Raskolnikov38 posted:So Franco just loaned out his tanks to anyone that showed up in Madrid with a movie camera then? Spain was a great place to shoot movies, they had a cooperative army, low expenses, cheap extras. Having the US military cooperating in movies at low/no expense is a relatively recent thing. I believe Force 10 from Navarone was shot in Yugoslavia, and they had zee Germans in T-34s.
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Dec 11, 2013 18:36
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It's really odd to call it the "Continuation War" because it was basically fought for the same reasons Romania did, as though Russia was going for another try after the Winter War or something. That's mostly a Finnish nationalist thing.
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Dec 12, 2013 18:59
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Alchenar posted:The fact that everyone still thought cavalry was a thing should tell you everything you need to know. To be fair, it's no surprise that it was thought of as one solution to the fact that it's impossible to pursue a ww1 army effectively, but they ended up being more trouble than they were worth.
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Dec 14, 2013 01:10
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Tevery Best posted:Isn't it that cavalry being so useless was mostly a Western Front thing and mostly related to the theatre specifics, though? IIRC the Eastern Front, where trench warfare was obviously far less practicable, saw a lot of cavalry use, and it played a major part in many wars that followed WWI (e.g. Polish-Soviet War, Turkish War of Independence, Greek-Turkish War). Cavalry actually served usefully in the Russian Civil War and the Russo-Polish War, but while the Russians maintained a large cavalry force during WW1, it never amounted to anything. The problem with cavalry is that the divisions were tiny and lacked fighting power yet they still consumed an inordinate amount of supplies.
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Dec 14, 2013 12:26
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Fangz posted:Um, no. In the earlier parts of WWII, the British made a deliberate decision to divide their tank force into Cruiser tanks (mobile exploitation), and Infantry tanks (slow, heavily armoured infantry support), as can be seen in the Crusader vs Matilda series. The Germans in fact ended up doing something similar - the Tiger was basically the German infantry tank. Ships but on land was a WWI thing. Also, most countries that had tanks divided tanks between Cavalry tanks (S-35s, BTs) and Infantry tanks (R-35s, T-26s). Even the Germans distinguished between anti-tank tanks and anti-infantry tanks early in the war. Yeah, the thing about tank warfare is that you really didn't see the breakthrough combat as much after 1942, and instead battles became more attritional. I think this has a lot to do with the improvement in infantry's ability to defend itself against tanks, both in infantry antitank weapons and in better use of towed antitank weapons. The infantry support role of tanks had become so pronounced that all countries involved that used armored divisions made them tend much more toward mechanized infantry, and infantry divisions got more tanks in them when they could.
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Dec 14, 2013 12:50
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Falukorv posted:How plausible the anti-semitism of the AK is in this series though i know to little of, better leave that to some of the experts in here. Anti-semitism was fairly strong in the years before WW2, and I have heard some stories of Polish and other Jews being afraid of some of the Polish underground for that very reason. I do not think the AK officially sanctioned such activity, but I am certain that some bands probably had political leanings in line with the right-wing Polish nationalists that became increasingly powerful in Polish politics.
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Dec 19, 2013 21:31
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Overland campaigns for the Japanese were somewhat restricted by their lack of motorized artillery, which gave them less of an advantage over the Chinese than they should have. In fact, there were times where the Nationalist Chinese had a significant artillery advantage. While they did fine in areas where the capability was less relevant, and on islands where guns could be placed ahead of time, their performance in battle with the Russians was greatly hampered by their lack of motorized artillery. Lack of motorized artillery was a problem in a lot of the smaller axis countries as well, making their infantry divisions weak. Romania, for example, did not have motorized artillery at the divisional level which hurt their combat capability quite a bit. They had to rely on copied Soviet 120mm mortars for the work and they weren't quite the same.
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Dec 30, 2013 20:36
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Are you sure you're thinking of the right army? The Free French were pretty important on the Western Front, they held their own in Alsace-Lorraine while the Ardennes Offensive was being ground down. It's important to understand that the US strategy was to arm forces like this because we were not going to field more than 90 divisions in the army(the US had very high demands on its manpower from other service branches). There was the possibility that we would be putting down 300+ divisions like the Soviets and Germans did, and then the Free French would be totally insignificant, but we chose to focus on other things.
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Jan 2, 2014 15:22
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BurningStone posted:I thought the German introduction of infiltration tactics was regularly able to break trench lines, but they were simply to exhausted to keep the attacks going. (And there was still a tendency to attack strong points instead of exploiting past them. Old habits die hard) The problem is that the infiltrating units had poor cohesion once they got past their objectives and they were still slower than the reserves they were up against. The Michael attacks petered out after a while, and there's some thought that their success had as much to do with poor British defensive philosophy than anything else.
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Jan 10, 2014 21:05
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Patton wasn't that great of a general so I'm not sure if how long he takes to overcome a fortified region isn't a great analysis of its effectiveness. I think you're understating how difficult the fortifications in Metz and along the German border were. They really did serve to help the Germans stabilize the situation in 1944 and were a problem for the Allies. Without a whole lot of preparation(the allied command, too, thought that fortifications were not very important and provided little doctrinal assistance), it took a long time to deal with the Metz system and other fortifications away from the Norman coast. I think the idea people have that fortifications were some useless thing because they didn't hold back their opponents indefinitely is wrong-headed.
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Jan 13, 2014 05:39
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steinrokkan posted:I would agree with the assessment that the British army was at its best during the last stages of 1918 - the British broke the German back and went from victory to victory, decisively and flawlessly reaping the rewards of prolonged war of attrition in a series of battles that were giant in scale but usually forgotten due to how one sided they were. Ultimately the British were responsible or about 50% of German casualties caused over the course of the final offensive. As a counterpoint, the Germans deliberately chose the British part of the line when they did their Michael offensive because the British had no real experience seriously defending positions so the Germans found it easier to get breakthroughs.
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Jan 23, 2014 13:15
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It's kind of comical hearing the British complain about the Belgians too, threatening to disposess them of their colonies if they didn't hold onto their little sliver of Belgium.
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Jan 23, 2014 17:03
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Taerkar posted:It's actually not quite as easy as you would thing. Space really is at a premium in armored vehicles and if you want the gas-hungry engine to have any real range worth a drat (And by that we're talking 100-200 miles) you're going to carry a lot of fuel. The door tanks were intended to be filled with sand when combat happened but IFVs(much like anything with a decent troop compartment) were all really dangerous vehicles to be in when a hit happened. It turn out armoring open air for 10+ men and their equipment is really really heavy so it's just not possible to make a survivable IFV. The BMP-1 in particular was not actually loaded out very well, as both its anti-tank missile and its main-gun were anti-tank weapons primarily, and the main gun wasn't up to snuff for long after its introduction in terms of anti-armor performance. The anti-tank missile was easy to upgrade though and did receive upgrades over the years. The BMP-2 and 3 both had far superior antipersonnel armament(though they carried more flammable ammunition in their compartments, a problem the Bradley shared).
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Jan 26, 2014 02:56
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World War II armies were much more capable of maneuver across enemy territory than their predecessors, but this gave them an enormous need for motor transport. No one, really, ever had 'enough' trucks. Even the US stripped its divisional motor pools for supply purposes once they made it into Western Europe. Modern armies need a very large train of supplies and the railroads were for various reasons unable to help cope.
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Jan 29, 2014 16:16
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PittTheElder posted:I understand TD Doctrine Chat is played out, but could someone explain exactly how anti-tank guns wound up being used? Were the guns on them better than tank guns, giving them a range advantage (wikipedia reading suggests the answer is generally no)? Were they intended for primarily an ambush type role? Were the crews forced to 'shoot and scoot' to avoid having a bunch of angry rear end tanks bearing down on them? Anti-tank guns were expedients. They were a way to get more anti-tank firepower on the field, and as tanks got better armored, the guns got bigger and better. The problem is, as they got bigger and better, their portability dropped and dropped. Also, infantry units got more integral anti-tank firepower as the war went on. From 1939-1945 AT guns were a vital part of all countries' defense against tank attacks. Most of these guns simply couldn't be moved quickly enough for "shoot and scoot" actions and sat in likely tank approaches. Early in the war, guns were spread out along the line in a cordon, but as it went on everyone realized it was better to concentrate them on likely approaches. Tanks are limited in their ability to use terrain and really preferred to be on roads to avoid bogging down and taking operational losses, so their ability to go in a mad rush and bear down on opponents was fairly limited. Keep in mind that most of the US tanks killed in Normandy were killed by anti-tank guns and panzerfausts, not enemy armor.
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Feb 6, 2014 23:38
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Ensign Expendable posted:The biggest advantage of an anti-tank gun is not penetration or anything like that. The Germans kept making bigger and bigger anti-tank guns that managed to be hilariously ineffective. The mark of a good anti-tank gun is its small size. Take the Soviet 45 mm model 1932, for instance. A crew of two or three guys can lug that thing around, set up a few camouflages positions in some bushes, and then spend the entire day pounding enemy armour in the side without being seen. That's one of the reasons the Soviets never ordered the 17 pounder AT gun from the British. Yeah, the penetration was good, but the thing was heavy as gently caress and impossible to push around a battlefield. Yeah, the death of the antitank gun had mostly to do with the fact that modern ATGs were just too heavy to move without a truck and that's a big liability in combat. The US forces in the pacific kept their 37mm guns because they were more practical than the 57mm, which required a tow to move.
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Feb 7, 2014 04:36
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Acebuckeye13 posted:On the other hand, the visibility gained is a huge increase in situational awareness, and for many commanders could mean the difference between seeing and not seeing the anti-tank gun that's about to shoot at your vehicle. I seem to recall that US tankers were actually encouraged to fight with their hatches open, partially for the visibility advantage, and partially so that commanders could use the potent .50 cal machine gun mounted on top of the tank against any target that looked remotely suspicious. A lot of the use of that .50 was actually to direct the main gun's fire, oddly enough. Yeah, fighting unbuttoned was a considerable advantage. Also having a powered turret traverse without the engine on was useful in a lot of situations.
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Feb 7, 2014 17:57
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StashAugustine posted:I'm generally familiar with how the conquest went down (although some of it's new to me and it's all interesting), but I was specifically wondering if the fighting was conducted with conventional European field tactics like the tercio. Off the top of my head, the lack of cavalry among the enemy might make pikes less attractive, but you guys are the ones with degrees. Cortez didn't have the kind of force that could use Spanish tercio tactics and the tercio really came into its own late in the 1500s, rather than in Cortez's time.
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Feb 11, 2014 01:08
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The US Army went into the war with vague notions armored breakthroughs with infantry holding ground, but it never really proved inadequate. I can't speak to the British Army, but the US never really had a crisis that forced any drastic changes the way the Germans and Soviets did. Things did change during the war of course, and there were a lot of operational and tactical innovations, but major changes happened after the war rather than during it. For example, US tanks were deployed both in independent tank battalions and as part of armored divisions. The independent tank battalions got parceled out to infantry divisions and then were spread out to provide armored support. It took until well into 1944 for the Army to stop rotating these battalions around so they could train with their respective divisions and learn to coordinate activities. Having armor on hand proved to be very helpful for the infantry as their fire support was invaluable, even in cities(where they could dominate the wider streets). The US Armored divisions were a lot better in this regard, as the armored infantry worked much more closely with their tank support. The armored infantry also had another significant advantage: since their transport was integral and wouldn't be stripped to meet other demands, they could carry more heavy weaponry than equivalent rifle platoons. They rarely got the chance to take part in breakthrough combat, but when they did the armored divisional organization really shone. After the war, the US configured all of its divisions more along the line of US armored divisions, with armor and infantry mixed in, so there was development, it's just nothing radically changed.
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Feb 12, 2014 04:04
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Slavvy posted:It also seems like the US had such enormous material, numerical and logistics advantages, not to mention fighting in the 'soft' theatres (compared to the eastern front) that there was never any enormous, crushing pressure to develop new doctrine. I don't think that the advantages were nearly as decisive in operational affairs as one might imagine. There were still a lot of material difficulties and the US army broadly improved over the years as a fighting force in skill as much as anything else. But I don't think the US or the UK ever really had an existential crisis that demanded they make changes to their entire way of fighting or organization.
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Feb 12, 2014 04:34
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PittTheElder posted:Speaking of which, I've heard that the US policy was to rotate divisions out of theatre as little as possible, and instead send reinforcements to them peicemeal. This has the serious disadvantage of not giving the new guys much time to train with and gain the knowledge of the seasoned troops, but required less raw manpower, since divisions were rarely sitting idle. The reason given was that there was such a demand for manpower at home, which was important since logistics win war, but there was also a lot of lobbying from capitalist types who needed men around to make bank. The US had to man the largest navy and merchant marine in the world, as well as the largest air force. On top of that, they also had to man the largest war industry in the world. This led to the Army and especially the infantry getting basically the worst manpower available. Manpower in the Army was far from infinite and the US replacement system was a response to that. That all being said, the replacement system was in fact something that changed after the war. It's also important to understand that the US fielded 90 divisions total, so there really weren't a lot to go around. Slavvy posted:I thought Dunkirk caused a complete rethink as to how the british did things? I usually think of organizational changes as a way to tell when big changes are happening, but fundamentally nothing really changed. While changes happened, it was nothing too terribly radical, and I don't think the British staff saw Dunkirk as a great failure of the British doctrine. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Feb 12, 2014 |
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Feb 12, 2014 04:37
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I wonder if there's any Stalingrad movie that mentions the Romanians that got caught up in the pocket. After a while they ran out of artillery shells, then the Germans just decided not to feed them any more.
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Feb 13, 2014 01:51
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xthetenth posted:I remember a pretty strongly voiced opinion from somebody that a tank is better than no tank no matter what kind of tank. Stuff like mid WWII tanks doing inordinate amounts of work supporting infantry in Southeast Asia during the rough timeframe of the Vietnam war. The firepower and that it can only really be engaged by particular weapons makes it a much harder time for the infantry without a tank. So yeah, that infantry fire-support role is apparently pretty useful. Yeah, this is pretty true. Even the worst tank in the world can destroy most other IFVs in service and provide valuable support.
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Feb 13, 2014 22:04
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Slavvy posted:I think it's unlikely for a situation to arise, nowadays, where something of WW2 vintage would be useful. Every third world hellhole seems to be drowning in RPG-7's and one of those will easily defeat the armour of a t-34 or similar, AFAIK. And RPG-7 will easily defeat the armor of everything in service short of a true blue MBT. We still use vehicles with thin armor for a lot of reasons. EDIT: While it's probably not worth the trouble to ship around WW2 vintage stuff, if it's there, you might as well use it. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Feb 13, 2014 |
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Feb 13, 2014 22:28
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