|
Nenonen posted:Why? It would be a death trap, and a logistical liability. If you want mobile fire support use technicals, add some steel plates for protection against small arms if you wish. A toyota truck can't carry anything with nearly the HE power of the 85mm gun in a T-34, and wheeled vehicles have some disadvantages. I mean, if you're going to call any vehicle that can't stand up to an RPG a death trap that cuts into just about every vehicle on the battlefield. Though, to be honest most old tanks that would still be in service would be T-55s which are head and shoulders better than T-34s. Most countries other than the Warsaw Pact originals just don't have the spare parts or ammunition to use the T-34s in their inventory for very long though.
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2014 23:14
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 14:36 |
|
|
Acebuckeye13 posted:The Israelis actually had a large number of converted "Super Shermans" in the '60s and '70s, which replaced the 76mm gun with a much larger and more capable 105mm. They did decently well against the various Arabic armies in the '67 and '73 wars, but as near as I can tell they were retired in the early '80s. I don't think anybody would ever put T-34s in regular service in any capacity, but if you have them in storage somewhere and have the means to run them, why not? Of course, you're right, the T-34 had poor visibility even by WW2 standards and the T-55s that are still in service are heavily modernized versions with new fire control, optics, and even missile launch capability.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2014 23:33
|
|
|
bewbies posted:Re. Operation Unthinkable, I remember reading an analysis from somewhere that broke down Soviet manpower both across the force and available in reserve (ie, both guys not on the line and guys not yet conscripted) and it seems like that analysis indicated fairly strongly that the Soviets were starting to seriously scrape the bottom of the barrel when it came to sheer number of bodies by 1945. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Almost every country hit a manpower crisis by or in 1944. The Soviets responded to theirs by taking rifle strength out of low-intensity areas and making the rifle divisions into machine gun-artillery units. This is probably also why Stalin allowed the Romanian army to avoid demobilization with the armistice, since they could provide valuable manpower to the campaign in the balkans and Hungary.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2014 22:40
|
|
|
The Entire Universe posted:Let's just say 9/11 broke a lot of people's brains. Because it did. It's weird hearing it from Keegan when some hacks from WW2 magazine were praising the humane interrogation methods of the Luftwaffe and comparing its success to that of Guantanamo.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2014 05:09
|
|
|
the JJ posted:You can put some BIG loving guns on a boat and have it be more mobile than anything short of, say, train mounted stuff on land. The Iowa had 9 16 inch guns as it's main armament. A quick wikicheck tells me that a modern arty battalion has ~12 ~150 mm guns. So navy guns are way bigger, and you've got about 3/4 of a battalions guns on just one BB, not counting the smaller tubes and AAA. Battleships could put out an incredible amount of firepower, but practical concerns made it not quite as effective as it could be. Because battleships didn't train with landing forces very much, the coordination was often not very good, and in the earlier US landings, surface battlegroups would have to leave to avoid being attacked by aircraft or submarines. This improved gradually over time, but the amount of new ships and new crews who were untrained in shore bombardment limited their effectiveness, too. The more and more I read, the more I learn about the importance of troops in a combined arms group training together. This is probably why the US Armored Division basically became the template for all divisions after World War II; the armored riflemen, armor, and self-propelled guns training together dramatically improved cooperation.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 4, 2014 04:18
|
|
|
Keep in mind that even after Midway, the Allies got it done in the Pacific with a fairly limited carrier presence. The post-Midway period was still a very even fight. The numbers get ridiculous only starting in 1944, after the carriers come back in strength, though both sides tried to rebuild their carrier air arms. And this culminated in the Marianas Turkey Shoot. Land based airpower got the Allies through the second half of 1942 and into 1943.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2014 01:26
|
|
|
EvanSchenck posted:I admit I looked this up just now, but Cornwallis didn't decide to go to Yorktown. He was under orders to fortify Yorktown so it could be used as a port and base of supply for a planned campaign against Virginia. It would appear that Yorktown was chosen more because the location was convenient for that purpose than for its defensibility. The British probably expected that if Cornwallis were pressed, they could supply, reinforce, or if necessary evacuate his forces by sea. Unfortunately for them de Grasse drove the Royal Navy out of the Chesapeake, which doomed Cornwallis. Yeah, keep in mind that the Union kept a permanent presence on the same peninsula during the American Civil War. So long as the US Navy controlled the seas, Fort Monroe and forces operating out of it were never really threatened.
|
|
#
¿
May 6, 2014 17:25
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:The IJN had a pretty good idea based on their previous experiences (notably Pearl Harbor) that hitting Midway with half their strike force wasn't going to cut it. They either needed to send everything or have a second wave ready to go without waiting for the first wave to confirm the need for a second wave. Nagumo did neither: he only sent half his force to Midway based on a super vague verbal order from Yamamoto to "keep half your planes in reserve" and additionally waited until his first wave came back before even thinking about sending a second one. This may have been a mistake but it ended up being inconsequential to the battle. Destroying Midway was unnecessary anyway, the only reason to strike midway was to draw US attention, so a half-done strike was enough for that.
|
|
#
¿
May 23, 2014 11:42
|
|
|
Ensign Expendable posted:It would have come in handy if they were planning on pushing into the mainland more, but that would involve not fighting a war with the Americans. Both the Chinese and Japanese did not get great use out of their tanks in China, and the coastal areas are the best parts of China for armored warfare, well, the best parts that had any real value. That being said, the Japanese did make improved tank designs, but they never left the home islands. There's not a lot of evidence that they would have made a lot of difference. The US was much much better at mechanized warfare than the Japanese were and I think in the more open territory of Honshu the US could have made good use of that advantage.
|
|
#
¿
May 30, 2014 12:21
|
|
|
For all the talk about Churchill and Stalin's dislike for one another, they did negotiate over control of countries in the Balkans. Churchill thought himself a great victor when he got the smaller part of "70/30 and 80/20" shares of control in countries like Romania, Hungary, and Bulgaria. In the end, though, countries are all-or-nothing affairs so the numbers were meaningless. For all the talk of FDR being a dupe to Stalin, he didn't bother making deals like that. Churchill did manage to get Stalin to cut off support for communist insurgents in Greece, bringing in a long era of military dictatorship.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 10, 2014 18:04
|
|
|
The BMP was originally made with the idea of allowing infantry to fight across a nuclear-devastated battlefield. The BMP-1's armament was deliberately made almost exclusively for fighting enemy armor(the main gun on a BMP-1 is more like a recoilless rifle and has poor HE performance), because dismounted infantry was assumed to not really be a factor in a nuclear wasteland. I mean, the gun ports were there so infantry could stay inside. I think what happened when others adopted it is that they tried to find tactical niches for them, and even the Soviets started thinking of IFVs more as infantry support vehicles providing overwatch for dismounted infantry than NBT-protected fighting transports. When the BMP-2 came out, the armament was changed to an autocannon, much more useful against infantry than the recoilless rifle on the previous vehicle. With the BMP-3, the armament was further optimized, with an autocannon and a gun-mortar, both powerful weapons to support infantry. I think when countries adopted the IFV en masse, they did find a needed role, but not the one they imagined. The IFV is a fairly imperfect solution to the need for infantry support vehicles, a problem as old as tanks themselves. Most modern battle tanks have armaments mostly optimized to killing other tanks, to the point that the M1 Abrams doesn't even have a true HE-Frag round! Not only that, these tanks are too expensive to dole out to infantry companies, anyway, so the support is not often available.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2014 22:55
|
|
|
If IFVs didn't have to carry troops they would be significantly better in a role as light armor to support infantry.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 13, 2014 17:02
|
|
|
MassivelyBuckNegro posted:Except, that's how they are sometimes used. The division tank battalion detaches sections and platoons to support rifle companies. Sometimes, but even if modern MBTs were great in this role, being doled out like this is not the same as being a part of the rifle company, because there's no training together. This was a problem encountered with the divisional tank battalions in WW2.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 13, 2014 18:50
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:* M4 Shermans were considered inferior to the T-34 in some circles because the narrower treads weren't as good when driving through mud and the Shermans consumed more fuel (personal note: I recall a post in the old Mil-Hist thread about a personal account of a Soviet tanker and he seemed to really enjoy the Sherman over the Soviet tanks for its creature comforts, so the Sherman being worse in this text may be from a more higher-up perspective From what i've read, the Sherman was considered much much more fondly by Soviet tankers than the T-34 for various reasons. In almost every respect the Sherman was better than the T-34, with improved reliability, better optics, and a more spacious turret. The only real problem was, as you said, the narrower tracks.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 14, 2014 14:50
|
|
|
Smoking Crow posted:Hi, I like tanks, especially the tanks of WWII, is there a nice overview book about tank use in WWII? I'm looking for a book with specs, production details, use in battle, etc. Stephen Zaloga's "Armored Thunderbolt" is a really good book on US tanks and what went on with them.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 6, 2014 15:04
|
|
|
It's important to understand that the technical differences between tanks did not really manifest as significant factors in the operational sense in WW2. Most tank battles were decided by who shot first, because whoever did shoot first gained a significant advantage and tended to put the victim in a reactive death-spiral because buttoned tanks don't see all that well. As a general rule, the defender in tank battles tended to be the one to shoot first so they had a significant advantage. This bears out in AFV losses through various phases of the campaign in the west.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 12, 2014 01:08
|
|
|
vintagepurple posted:Speaking of tank-chat, I've always wondered about the accuracy of fixed-weapon assault vehicles like the StuG. It seems like having to physically move the vehicle to travere the barrel horizontally would be a huge hassle but in a lot of cases (and in a lot of tabletop games) they function almost as well as tanks but cheaper. It seems like any situation where you're not sitting in a fixed position or firing on one, the static gun would be a huge liability. How did they really do against enemy tanks? I just have this image of the tank just displacing and rotating the turret to hit faster than the StuG could move, line up, and fire. While hull-mounted guns are a bit of a disadvantage(any time they had to turn to traverse the gun, the gun would shake and be unusable for some time), the fact of having AFVs available to support infantry was a big boon. There's a reason every country tried to find ways to stick tanks/tank-like vehicles in with their infantry formations with varying degrees of success.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 12, 2014 02:02
|
|
|
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. I dunno, it feels like everyone wants to think that the way the war was going, that the Allies should have been across the Rhine in 1944, carrying offensives into Germany, but I don't feel like any campaign could have carried on there for very long. The allied forces operated on a shoestring at that point and needed to stop or at least slow down to catch their breath.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2014 17:29
|
|
|
FAUXTON posted:Ask people about the urban legend regarding early Russian jet fighters using vacuum tubes instead of transistors because you can't EMP a vacuum tube. EMP is significantly overrated as a threat to electronics anyway.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 30, 2014 15:54
|
|
|
Throatwarbler posted:This is obviously a more complex topic than can be covered in a single comedy forums post but in order to understand the Officer/NCO system you have to remember that whole "war is politics by other means" thing and that in most societies there's a distinct gap between the ruling class and the proletariat. A competent army is nice but a politically reliable one is better. The whole incompetent officer/get-r-dun NCO thing is basically a manifestation of that. Officers first and foremost are politicians,the whole career/incentive structure is that of a politician, not some mindless technocrat or someone who is Good At Their Job. Countries that have strong middle classes, rule of law and protection for individual property rights tend to have more people who stay around long enough to become competent at their jobs but who aren't nobles and/or politicians. You see why Britain and the US are good at this while Tsarist Russia not so much. Actually, I think the lack of NCOs in the tsarist army has more to do with the fact that the institution tended to have long service soldiers become officers instead of NCOs as the upper/middle classes of Russia did not produce enough officers to run the large army they had. A soldier who had served long enough could go back, get an education and become an officer fairly easily. Yeah, it probably comes as a shock but in WW1 there were more officers who came from the enlisted in Tsarist Russia than in Britain, France or Germany. poo poo's complex, yo.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2014 12:28
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Do you know what kind of education they were getting? Are we talking basic schooling (literacy and numeracy, basically) or are we talking about education in the sense of "cultivation" etc. that usually matters to the sort of people who think its important that officers be seen as members of the social and cultural elite? From what I understand, it was just basic literacy and numeracy, not really social and cultural stuff like you say.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2014 16:04
|
|
|
Alchenar posted:One other thing to bear in mind is that the Allies brought more upgunned Shermans to Normandy than the Germans brought Panthers and Tigers. The crucial thing they were lacking wasn't tanks that could hit hard, it was tanks that could take a hard hit. The Bureau of Ordinance did design a bunch of tanks post-Sherman, one of which was the M6 Heavy tank. The problem with the M6 is that it was ready to go when the KV-1 was going out of service and was almost identical in protection while being even bigger, heavier and less practical. This lead to the giving up on high levels of protection in the new tank because it wasn't considered practical. Most improvements came with the gun and suspension, which puttered along until well into 1944 until they finally settled on the M26.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 17, 2014 22:56
|
|
|
wdarkk posted:Wouldn't a breakthrough tank have been pretty useful for the hedgerow areas? Granted it wouldn't be as useful once you left. Keep in mind that during the war, the amount of armor needed to deal with modern anti-tank guns made a tank really heavy which caused a lot of issues. The hedgerow problem was more one of tactics than hardware.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 17, 2014 23:13
|
|
|
PittTheElder posted:What is it that's causing all the T-72 and such in Syria to explode in such a dramatic fashion after taking RPG hits? It must be the ammo cooking off, but it all happens in a few seconds, and I'd be amazed if there was enough time for a fuel fire to get going. And that should be with just a copper jet penetrating the fighting compartment, not any explosives. The autoloader in the T-72 requires loading trays that have no particular protection, which causes ammunition to blow up all the time. Combined with the middling protecion of the T-72M and M1s that the Syrians have, that's what makes them blow up so much.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 18, 2014 00:05
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:Speaking of cold war tanks, how was the parallel development and deployment of tanks during the cold war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact/USSR? The impression I got, particularly from Red Army is that the Soviets gradually settled into a quantity > quality paradigm to fight with their doctrine of deep operations of having many tanks to attack many places along the front to exploit weaknesses in the enemy line (because their tanks can't be everywhere); while NATO seems to have eventually trended towards 'quality' of having larger, more heavily armored tanks. The problem with talking about tanks in generalities like this is that you kind of gloss over the specifics. On both the NATO and WP sides of the curtain, there were modern whizz-bang tanks, ww2-era relics, and everything in between. There is, however a convergence of organizations on both sides from WW2 that gives you armor-motorized infantry teams as the basic front line organization, with varying mixes of tanks and motorized infantry, no one went on foot. The USSR had a massive army, at least in theory, but the forces deployed in Germany were not that much more numerous than what NATO had deployed there. Of course, in Germany you also had the cream of the Soviet army there, the T-80s, T-64s, etc. What really gave the Warsaw Pact their scary numbers were the district forces, which had anything from T-34-85s to T-72s. The big difference here is that the district troops were kept active in a way the National Guard, for example, were really not. The Soviets were also far more willing to keep older AFVs in use and modernized their T-55s and T-62s quite heavily. The 70s were a bad time in NATO tank design history, because the MBT/Kpz-70 was a big bust, way too ahead of its time for its own good, but some of it got made into what were eventually the Leopard 2 and M1 Abrams, which is what's traditionally thought of when we think of NATO tanks(neither the M60A3 nor the Leo 1A4/5 was not a great match for the later model T-64s, T-72s, or T-80s). That all being said, technical differences aren't the be-all and end-all, and the level of training and readiness would probably have determined the outcome more than technical differences. The different eras of tank design are really interesting in how they reflect prevailing thought of the day. For example, the Leopard 1 and AMX-30 were designed in an era where people thought ATGMs would make tanks obsolete, so armor wasn't really considered important in these designs.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 18, 2014 02:25
|
|
|
CoolCab posted:Yeah as I understand it (although I'm not a TFR goon, one can correct me if I'm wrong!) per-rifled firearms were so inaccurate that deliberately hitting a target at anything other then close range is impossible. That's why they fired in volleys. There are semi confirmed rifle hits at 700-1000 yards in the Civil War. The advantage rifled weapons had was enormous. While rifled guns were a significant advantage in terms of accuracy, a lot of the accuracy issues involved with smoothbore muskets had to do with low quality weapons, drills that did not allow for aiming, and the lack of sight aperatures on the weapons. Men taking aimed shots even with smoothbore muskets could hit targets with some degree of accuracy. This is why the French use of light infantry worked in the Napoleonic Wars.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 28, 2014 13:01
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Wait, what? The Long Land Pattern Musket (Brown Bess) was a smoothbore, as was the French Charleville 1777. I can't remember off the top of my head what the Austrians and Germans were using, but I'm pretty sure it was a derivative of the 1777. I can't say with certainty when rifled muskets became regular issue, but it sure as hell wasn't during the Napoleonic wars, at least not for any major European power. Keep in mind that repeating rifles were about ten times as expensive as muzzleloaders, and even more expensive to supply with ammunition(there were no models that could accomodate paper cartridges). For example, Buford's cavalry at Gettysburg had to leave to go all the way to Philadelphia to get ammunition for their Spencers after they ran out. While Spencers were quite powerful, the Union cavalry's performance did not seem to bear out the idea that repeaters were a decisive weapon at the time. The guys at the war department had to equip hundreds of thousands of men and at the time it just wasn't practical to buy them all Henry rifles or Spencers or even Burnside carbines.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 29, 2014 20:48
|
|
|
Kemper Boyd posted:Shattered Sword makes the point that Midway wasn't actually a decisive battle in the sense that it's usually portrayed as. Japanese victory at sea would just delay the inevitable and make the war more bloody. Yeah, the problem is basically that carrier parity basically remained true throughout the yearlong period after Midway(the numbers varied but it was about 2 on 2). Basically, the US fleet did not make a huge impact until 1944 when they had so many ships that four extra Japanese fleet carriers would have made little difference(The US main force in 1944 had 16 fleet carriers). The problem for the Japanese is that the Solomons proved to be where their resources were stretched thin. A lot of what we faced on the way back toward Japan on the islands were base force troops, rather than IJA infantry because garrisoning and supplying all those isolated island garrisons was hard.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 16, 2014 12:41
|
|
|
Alchenar posted:It's also the first war in which trenches were the norm on the battlefield as opposed to just sieges, the first war in which mortars were commonly used and the first war in which regular harassing fire by artillery was a thing. You have to remember that the armaments crisis of 1914-15 on both sides is indicative of a use of ordinance that was an order of magnitude greater than anything that had been before, across a much wider range of field pieces. The fact that things like trenches and indirect fire existed in one form or another for a century and more before WW1 isn't really of relevance to how they were used in WW1. If you compare WW1 artillery to artillery before it, it's like night and day. It's not that indirect fire didn't exist during the Napoleonic, Crimean, and American Civil Wars, it's that it was nowhere near as effective as it would be in WW1. Countries still kept huge stocks of guns meant solely to be fired over open sights, because that's how most artillery was used before the war.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 25, 2014 16:46
|
|
|
KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Horses were generally more valuable as logistics resources than as cavalry, even in the east. A shitload of horses died Germany / Austria Hungary due to the blockade, which I assume means they were eaten. The problem with cavalry in ww1 is that the divisions used about as much supply as infantry divisions but were about a quarter of the size, having even less firepower. They were more of a burden than a help. Brusilov just kept them way back because they were mostly a burden. They lost all their value as an offensive unit. The British always kept some on hand in the vain hope that they would break through but it never happened. That possibility still seems a bit more imaginary than real. There are examples of infantry companies holding off entire cavalry divisions early in the conflict.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 26, 2014 01:56
|
|
|
The Merry Marauder posted:The tone of the narratives I've seen sound as though Early's commanders were unable to keep discipline, extending the, as you rightly point out, necessary resupply delays, and causing straggling, hungover and otherwise. One of the common threads throughout the 1864 campaign is how the Confederate armies in general tended to hemorrhage troops from desertion, because of the privations involved and the southern drafts. It doesn't surprise me that this would be a problem with Early's army.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 28, 2014 02:16
|
|
|
Did any pikemen lug around pistols as a backup weapon?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 19, 2014 14:30
|
|
|
If you want to see more Fury silliness, watch the scene where the tank platoon supports works with infantry in the open field. In April 1945, the tactics had been hashed out enough that you wouldn't see a conga line of infantry hiding behind each tank(tanks draw fire, veteran infantry stayed AWAY from the tanks). Instead you'd see the tanks stay behind and provide supporting fire while the infantry leads the way. Tanks never drove that close to enemy infantry because that gets you into range of the improvised antitank weapons most infantry had, and tanks simply don't need to be that close to do what they do best.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 22, 2014 11:51
|
|
|
I don't think I would consider the Overland campaign of 1864 a fine example of generalship by Lee or a poor one by Grant. Lee, for example, squandered valuable men in assaults in the Wilderness, while Grant was often the victim of bad luck.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 8, 2014 02:40
|
|
|
If you want to see the transition of late medieval armies into the 1600s era, you have to look at the Italian wars and the rise and fall of the swiss pikemen. The swiss pikes' success spurred the development of more integrated firepower with pike units to defeat both the Swiss and French gendarmes. Pistol-armed cavalry showed up as a way to deal with all the pikes.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 21, 2014 01:55
|
|
|
JcDent posted:
The T-55 is the most produced tank ever. It's cheap, has space for plenty of modernization, and is also actually fairly light, while retaining a semblance of armor protection, a significant step up from things like IFVs these days. The USSR(and Russian Federation) kept them in service for their marines all the way into the 2000s with modernizations that gave them IR sights, laser rangefinders, reactive armor, and improved ammunition(along with tube-launched ATGM capability). The T-62(I assume you're talking about the T-62, because the T-64 is a very different tank and could be considered part of an entirely different generation) was a marginal upgrade over the T-55 at the cost of a lot of weight. It did have a better gun, but improved ammunition for the T-55 eliminated that advantage. That being said, it still had some export success and could be modernized, too. T-62s are still around in a lot of places, just like the T-55, and these days they're not really worse than each other. One of the most common observations of Western analysts about those tanks is that the T-55 and T-62 were the last Soviet tanks to have been made for human beings(a reference to the T-64/72/80 having made the crew space much smaller using an autoloader to get more armor while keeping the weight down). As to t-34/85s, a tank is a tank. Being able to have a tank can be a lot more helpful than not, though it probably takes a lot of effort to get creaky T-34s to run. You see a lot of improvised armored vehicles in third world conflicts, so it doesn't surprise me that they would try to make T-34s work. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 12:02 on Nov 24, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2014 12:00
|
|
|
Tevery Best posted:Basically I'm interested in how weapons development influenced land war doctrine - on lower levels especially - and the other way around. For example, I've heard it said that the development of the BMP really threw NATO planners for a loop, since it was a quite radical increase of mobile infantry fighting power, and this meant a lot of changes to how a unit operated. I'd like to know if that is true or not, whether or not there were other such or similar scenarios, and how they came to be. This is more or less the kind of thing I'd like to hear. I'm not exactly interested in other military branches all that much. Also, the Airpower thread is pretty great, but also daunting. I think the BMP was one of those whizz-bang things NATO saw and felt they had to emulate because they misinterpreted what it was meant to be. If you look at what the BMP-1 was, it was fairly obviously developed to get infantry through NBC wastelands. This is why the vehicle was designed to be fought from inside(almost no one fights mounted in IFVs any more for a really good reason). The BMP-1's armament is almost exclusively good against vehicles, with a recoilless rifle(with almost negligible HE performance) and an anti-tank guided missile. The gunports were part of that, too. Keep in mind that most Soviet motor rifle units were still equipped with BTRs which were a lot more conventional in nature. Personally, I don't think IFVs are actually that practical because nothing about their useful combat role involves them actually carrying infantry except in situations where NBC protection is needed, and the vehicles give up a ton of protection to be able to carry troops.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 27, 2014 02:09
|
|
|
JcDent posted:By the way, now that we mentioned katanas: so Samurai were horse archers (the most dickish unit to appear in any Total War game) who only used swords at the last resort and in considered them shameful (since what kind of lovely horse archers needs to use a sword), but started loving those things when they got reduced to mostly administrative duties? I don't think that's quite the best characterization of it. Swords were a very common backup weapon, even among ashigaru troops during the 1500s. They did eventually become a status symbol when the sword hunts happened and the peasantry lost the ones they had gotten during the war, but I think we're way too quick to go down the well of a strange sense of honor and shame. A lot of the talk about shame and honor in different kinds of weapons is from the Edo Period in an attempt to give the samurai some kind of culture rather than something they actually believed at the time.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2014 12:48
|
|
|
Disinterested posted:The US got more than enough use out of them. The US wasn't just arming for WW2 at that point, but potential wars with the USSR. The US had a back-up plan in case the B29 failed, too. It was called the B32. It saw very limited use at the very end of the war. The B-29 had a lot of issues when it came into service as well. if you want to look at goofy designs, look at the designs of tanks that the Bureau of Ordnance put out from 1942-1944. Huge interiors, double front and rear hull machine guns, all the armor and armament of a KV-1 with almost twice the weight.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2014 21:39
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 17, 2024 14:36 |
|
|
Tias posted:No one? I realize it's a fairly overlooked part of the war, but anything helps, even if you can just point me at another source: I actually did a thesis on Romania in World War 2, so I can talk about a variety of topics. Most soldiers were eager at the opening of the war, but as it went on, like anyone else, their morale faltered. By the time they got to Stalingrad, where Antonescu had brought in every man he could spare, a lot of the Romanian soldiers were conscripts and not the most spirited about fighting in distant lands. The Germans regarded them with contempt most of the time, to the point where they just stopped feeding the Romanians in the 6th army perimeter after they ran out of artillery ammunition. After the disasters around Stalingrad, the Romanians took more than a year basically trying to recover from the disastrous loss. In 1944, they had finally managed to reconstitute a proper army, and morale was reasonably high in anticipation of defending the country. Most Romanian soldiers were very poor, and the country still had the paradigm of aristocratic officers and peasant soldiers. The country was backwards in almost every respect. Oil production made the country rich enough to buy a sizable and equipped army, but the men manning it were inadequate in technical education and skill. While this was not as bad in 1944 as it was in say 1941, it was still a problem in the country. There was very little mechanical knowledge, and agriculture was not mechanized very well at all. The Romanian army was extremely poorly motorized, and many of the soldiers had scarcely seen a car, much less a tank. The Iron Guard was actually suppressed during the war. Antonescu distrusted them and while there may be some sentiments among the men, it was not open. The Germans did keep Horia Sima, the Iron Guard leader in exile, but in general they preferred Antonescu and thought him much more competent than Sima. This is probably why the coup in late 1944 was able to succeed.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2014 01:17
|
|