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I've been reading through Adrian Goldworthy's biography of Caesar and he mentions pila in it. Specifically, he mentions that the whole "designed to bend" thing is bullshit. They certainly did occasionally bend but it was more of a side effect. Something designed to bend would be kind of an iffy weapon at best (since you wouldn't know if it would bend immediately on impact and you couldn't use it as a spear in a pinch).
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Nov 14, 2013 11:56
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About the tank post, the Panzer III was initially armed with the 37 mm gun, which actually happened in the best nazi tradition: it was supposed to have the 50 mm gun but the manufacturers didn't care about the directives the Wehrmacht (and Hitler) gave. If i remember correctly, it had to do with re-designing the turret of the tank which they didn't want to do because they had already manufactured a whole bunch of turrets so the manufacturers would have lost money on that. Hitler and Guderian apparently got mad because of this because the 37 mm gun was already becoming obsolete at the start of the war.
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Nov 14, 2013 12:07
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Obdicut posted:Cavalry question: I've heard it asserted that the Hakkapeliitta, Finnish light cavalry, didn't actually exist and weren't actually used by Gustavus Adolphus. Is there any truth to either their existence or their definite disproof? There were three cavalry regiments from Finland in the Swedish army, so they did exist as a thing. However, the regiments were pretty much the same as the rest of the Swedish cavalry. There's a lot of myths involved with them but I don't think any contemporary Swedish source thinks of them as anything else than just cavalry.
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Nov 15, 2013 10:18
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Hogge Wild posted:Their horses were small farming horses, not muscular brutes bred by Polish or Habsburg noble families for generations, so they probably wouldn't have been very effective in traditional charges. I read a book about the Great Nordic War recently, back then the average height for a horse taken into service was 140 centimeters. Which is more like a pony than a horse.
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Nov 15, 2013 10:42
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a travelling HEGEL posted:It's actually not impractical for a musketeer or pikeman to carry a small weapon as a backup, because after poo poo starts going down the field is going to look like this: Isn't the name of that image "Bad War?"
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Nov 17, 2013 16:27
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I think I mentioned this in the earlier thread, but the Japanese ops planning was really haphazard at Midway. For instance, Nagumo was aware of that it would probably be a good idea to recon beforehand to find out where the US carriers are. The idea was to use Emily flying boats from the Marshall Islands, refuel them at French Frigate Shoals from a sub and then look for the carriers. At the time, there was an American seaplane tender at the French Frigate Shoals so the whole recon op got scrubbed.
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Nov 20, 2013 13:12
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Hornfischer's Last Stand Of The Tin Can Sailors is also worth a read. It's about the Battle off Samar which was talked about a page back.
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Nov 20, 2013 15:20
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Raenir Salazar posted:How was military tactics training? Did Rome have anything like a 'High Academy of Military Science', something like West Point to train all of their cadres or was that something that didn't kick in until the 18th century? You probably went out to join an older magistrate's army somewhere out in the provinces to learn from them, both to learn how to run a war and to get some military experience which was seen as more or less obligatory for a political career.
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Nov 21, 2013 10:15
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I recently read Jukka Rislakki's "Paha Sektori" (Bad Sector) which isn't available in english. In it he talks a lot about what sort of nuclear threats Finland and the Nordic countries faced. Since the Soviets were aware of the fact that in case of war, the Swedes would ditch their neutrality and allow the US in, the Soviets targeted everything that could be used as an airfield. The US did the same to Finland, since the whole finnish neutrality policy wasn't credible at all. This threat subsided a bit after everyone had missiles, since the airbases lost quite a bit of their importance.
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Nov 23, 2013 17:19
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Ferrosol posted:There was the Flying Tigers in WWII who were a bunch of ex-american airforce vets who fought for the nationalist Chinese against the Japanese. Also I suppose the French Foreign Legion which fought in various battles kind of counts. Beyond that I'm drawing blanks for mercs. On traditional mercs I'm drawing a blank too, but I think the Allied sent some intelligence types to Burma and Malaysia to pay for some local potentates to fight on their behalf.
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Nov 24, 2013 16:28
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I always thought that giving up the fixed coastal artillery when your geography is like Finland's or Sweden's is pretty drat stupid. The reason that's been given in Finland is that the forts are vulnerable to air attack but in case of war, you'd probably rather have the enemy expend their air assets on trying to bomb T-55 turrets that are sitting on top of islands rather than say your army's mechanized components.
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Nov 29, 2013 09:10
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Comstar posted:Stand off weapons with laser or GPS guiding make large scale static fortifications pretty useless, if you know where they are. Of course. On the other hand, every possible enemy has limited air assets and limited stocks of precision weapons. And the thing is that what with the Archipelago sea being what it is, i.e. shitloads of tinyass islands, relatively shallow, not too many shipping lanes leading to the mainland, even the cheapass "take a tank turret and put into on a rock" forts have some value.
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Nov 30, 2013 12:41
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Guildencrantz posted:A whole generation grew up surrounded by that war, and "grizzled badass and also a broken human being incapable of relating to the world except through violence" can't make for a great peacetime resume. The level of violence soldiers saw during the Early Modern Era wasn't really all that. Remember that there were relatively few battles over the course of the 30YW and the biggest killer was disease. Swedish criminal data from the 17th century shows a rise in violent crime but at the same time, when the wars were on, the level of violence was lower than in the 16th century. It kind of looks to me (I've mostly read about Sweden and Finland) that those who survived wars in that era and got back pretty much went back to their day jobs. Which more or less was always farming.
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Dec 6, 2013 16:26
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Stalingrad has tons of actual WW2 vintage tanks in it. They loaned them from the Finnish Armor Museum that apparently has a pretty cool collection of stuff and quite a few WW2 era tanks in operational shape.
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Dec 11, 2013 20:52
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Flesnolk posted:On a similar note, how were military operations coordinated in those days? You didn't exactly have radios and phones to be ordering a bunch of different army groups around, and carrier birds can only do so much I'd imagine. Mostly, you didn't do stuff like that because you couldn't. The Romans could do poo poo like "let's send legate Biggus Dickus with two legions to put the Bongrip tribesmen in Iberia to the sword until they surrender and this other dude here goes to Gallia Transalpina to do the same" but since messages generally only travel as fast as a ship can sail or a dude can ride, a pre-19th century general/king in the field had to stick close to their army, keep it together as much as possible (need to balance out foraging and spreading out troops too much) and that was pretty much the extent of that. You didn't really have army groups, if you were a major nation you might have several armies but they're most likely all doing their own thing, since getting them to show up on time at a certain location was really hard. It's worth noting that even the invention of the telegraph and later on the telephone didn't initially do much on this front. They were more useful for the defending side since no army was equipped to lay down telegraph/telephone lines while they advance. And even if they had access to them on the advance, relying on the connection staying open was dumb. You could probably argue that even in WW1, communications on an army level didn't improve much because portable wireless wasn't really a thing, while static communications did improve. Robert E. Lee had a habit of planning operations where he divided his army to concentrate them at a target location later on and he's considered to be somewhat good on account of being able to pull that poo poo off, because the most likely outcome of operations like that means you'll get defeated in detail. Naturally having a dude like McClellan heading the opposition is an advantage.
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Dec 12, 2013 09:25
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veekie posted:Probably not completely blind, they'd have a fair idea of how wealthy their opponent is and how much population they have. You could arrive at a ballpark figure for relative manpower and equipment ability. Actually, population figures were strictly kept secrets back in the day. It's a lot harder to estimate what sort of manpower your enemy has when 90% of the population lives in the countryside.
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Dec 12, 2013 10:54
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About ten years back I travelled across Germany and my German is fairly atrocious. Turns out that throwing a bunch of deutschmarks at a taxi driver and saying "Superfast Ferry Terminal, schnell schnell, zwanzig minuten, schnell schell" works pretty well. re: Gustavus Adolphus, everyone should know that Torstensson was a better commander than he ever was.
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Dec 29, 2013 13:23
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Hegel, just wanted to let you know that I'm seriously considering getting into Early Modern history after I finish my comparative religion thesis on Nazi Germany.
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Dec 30, 2013 14:16
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Another problem was that the Kwantung Army had been stripped of equipment and men to defend the Home Islands. It would be interesting to know how much of that equipment and personnel ever made it to Japan, considering how well the USN was blockading Japan at that time.
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Dec 30, 2013 21:25
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a travelling HEGEL posted:I actually made the same switch from studying Nazism to the Early Modern. Reading Nazi stuff depressed me too much--the guys I study now may lead grim lives of almost unrelieved horror, but apart from that they're normal people. Nazis write like random word generators designed to spit out bullshit; Early Modern guys write like human beings. There's also the issue that beyond a semi-ambitious master's thesis I can't come up with poo poo to say about the Nazis, when it comes to the whole issue of Nazi Germany and religion. There's only that many words you can squeeze out when your end result is "they didn't have their poo poo together and their policies were all over the place."
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Dec 30, 2013 22:39
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The German sub fleet would have done a shitload of damage against the Royal Navy at Narvik if they would have had magnetic pistols that would have worked. But subs against military targets is kind of a touch and go thing: like Alchenar said you gotta be in the right place at the right time and that's the hard part. Recommend trying this in a game like War in the Pacific. Even in the game, oceans are pretty big and if there's not a reason for someone to go through a specific sea area, good luck even finding a fast-moving target.
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Jan 2, 2014 13:33
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Before you had explosives, anything like that was kind of pointless, considering the effort you had to make to actually throw poo poo longer distances. Never mind that the equipment you needed for that wasn't exactly portable enough for battlefield use.
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Jan 3, 2014 11:07
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It's probably worth noting that the Germans did try offensive aerial mining, but it didn't end up as effective as the US operations against Japan mostly because they could never stop the Brits from sweeping the mines. And magnetic mines (which the Germans saw as a sort of secret weapon) can be sweeped with airplanes. The biggest success that the Germans had was that they managed to lay enough mines to shut down Soviet movement in the Finnish Gulf.
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Jan 4, 2014 20:18
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gradenko_2000 posted:Part of the problem was logistics: There were no east-west rail lines running from Russian Poland to German Prussia, and Russian and German rail gauges were incompatible anyway (a fact that would also weigh heavily in the next war), which meant that as Russian supplies reached the pre-war border, they could only be sent to the front via horse-drawn transportation. This made it very difficult to establish telephone and telegraph lines running from the front back to Russian high command, on top of the Germans destroying any telegraph/telephone stations and lines they left behind as well as evacuating all rolling stock to prevent Russians from using rail-lines without need for gauge conversion. I recently read of an even funnier problem the Russians had: all Russian corps had their own logistics, supply and reinforcement setups with very little intercorps cooperation. Peter Englund's The Beauty and The Sorrow mentions Russian brigades marching away from the Germans towards the Austrian front, despite the Austrians having been defeated and the Germans whipping every formation thrown at them (to simplify it), because there was no intercorps cooperation and no way in hell was the corps commander borrowing a fresh brigade to another corps.
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Jan 8, 2014 13:30
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Slavvy posted:So if attack was basically futile and defence was far more efficient in a men and materiel, and everyone in command pretty much knew this already, what was the point of making any kind of attack at all? Why not just constantly defend and let the other side wear themselves out? Was it really just because they thought Germany was right on the edge of collapsing and throwing more men at them would hasten that? Several reasons, most of which go back to the attitude that inaction is defeatism. And yes, the fact that Germany was sitting on a bunch of French and Belgian real estate.
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Jan 11, 2014 00:30
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A thing you learn from linguistics is that whenever you have an expression commonly used, there's going to emerge a short word for it. Swedish has a word for "pay us so we don't burn down your city." The Early Modern Period was fun.
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Jan 19, 2014 10:54
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Nenonen posted:Removal of the Tsar was inevitable. However the Bolshevist takeover is far from being a certainty in all what-if scenarios. Bolsheviks were very weak and the October revolution probably would not have succeeded if Germany hadn't helped Lenin back to Russia. I always felt Grand Duke Michael got the short end of the stick when the guy was smart enough to not accept the throne after Nicholas abdicated, since he wanted the Duma to ratify him becoming Czar first, but he got killed anyway.
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Jan 22, 2014 08:37
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Pre-industrialized logistics had the issue of being vulnerable as heck, too, since if you tried to resupply or reinforce, you probably had to do it with all the eggs in one basket. For instance, in the Great Northern War, Charles XII tried to resupply his army that was cruising around Russia but the end result was that the corps that were bringing the supplies got beat by the Russians in the Battle of Lesnaya and as a result, no supplies ever got to the main army. Instead they got 6000 hungry mouths to feed and the surly general Adam Ludwig Lewenhaupt who later surrendered the entire army to Peter the Great.
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Jan 24, 2014 08:51
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One of my favorite things in the 30YW is about Gallas going to Pomerania to drive out the Swedes and he ends up sieging something like three half-abandoned forts that have a few dozen Swedes in them, almost all of them half dead from malnutrition and disease. Because apparently someone hadn't really given a poo poo about the whole "maybe our garrisons should have like, food and stuff"-thing. And then Gallas ends up losing anyway because half his army drops dead because Pomerania was a wasteland with no food.
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Jan 24, 2014 09:24
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My great-grandmother had her favorite horse requisitioned from her for the war effort in 1941. However, the horses weren't returned to their owners but the owners were compensated instead. Late 1944, she travelled all around Finland for the state horse auctions to find the horse. Finally she did, won the auction and returned home with her horse. That's my war horse story.
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Jan 30, 2014 08:29
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WW1 was really the moment when the citizens of all nations involved should have risen up and hanged their leaders. No one really gained anything from the whole ordeal.
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Jan 31, 2014 16:35
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Fangz posted:Did they purge the lower ranks as well? The impression I had of the Red Army in WWII was that the top ranks were generally good - and sometimes superb, but the low ranking officers and NCOs were usually awful. The top ranks suffered from being filled out with rapidly promoted lower officers who didn't have experience of holding higher level commands.
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Feb 3, 2014 20:41
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Slaan posted:I'm guessing he muddled through mostly because the Germans were having the same problems of A)Keeping the Schedule and B)Seeing franc-tireurs needing to be shot everywhere. The Germans also had the issue of Moltke being kind of a fuckup who first threw a shitfit when the political leadership suggested that maybe Germany should avoid being the aggressor and this would have messed up Moltke's mobilization plan. Though there were alternative plans that could have been used, which the Railroads section of the General Staff had developed for that eventuality. Later Moltke lost his cool, stripped divisions from the western armies and didn't stick with the original plan of invasion.
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Feb 4, 2014 09:08
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ArchangeI posted:No, there were no alternative plans. The head of the Railroad section claimed after the war that he and his staff could have improvised a mobilization against Russia only, but a) France is still obliged to come to Russia's aid, meaning that they can't be ignored and b) you don't loving improvise a complete turnaround of a million+ men army. With six months warning? Easy. Three months? Doable. The moment the Archduke breathes his last? Hard. Three days before M-Day? Yeah right. The last German mobilization plan against Russia was from 1912, I think. If I recall Tuchman's writing correctly, the suggestion was to not march into Belgium first and instead reworking the plans to fight a defensive war in the west, because that would have put a serious crimp into French hopes of getting the Brits involved. The mobilization plans were kind of rear end-backwards in that way. Nenonen posted:AC130's can't fly at tree top level to avoid enemy detection, hover above a ridgeline for just long enough to fire missiles at target, then scoot. Attack helicopters are also protected against small arms fire, AH-64 is said to survive even 23mm AAA shells hitting its rotor blades so a SAW has no chance even if it managed to hit the fast flying chopper. And of course they have counter measures against missiles and mostly fly under cover of darkness, so that MANPADS is going to have a hard time. The West doesn't take well to casualties because no one has really fought for any serious stakes for a long while. Taking casualties while defending your own soil is one thing, to take casualties for vaguely defined geopolitical goals is another.
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Feb 4, 2014 15:58
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Re: Blitzkrieg, it's worth noting that Blitzkrieg as a doctrine is to some degree a later invention. The reality is somewhat more complex. A good case study is what happened before the Germans invaded France: Halder had planned a throughly conventional offensive (that he actually had no confidence in) but since the plans got lost when a courier by mistake landed in Belgium, Manstein and Guderian got an opportunity to make an alternate one more along the lines of how they felt armor should be used. And when the attack kicked off, the French pretty much kept marching into Belgium while the main German thrust hit them in the northeast, where they weren't. Post-war, the unbeatable Blitzkrieg was a way of explaining why the Germans whupped the allies so badly when in fact the French high command being utterly poo poo at their job had as least as much to do with it than the great plan Manstein and Guderian came up with.
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Feb 12, 2014 10:10
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As far as I remember, the French did forsee the danger of an attack through the Ardennes. However, it was ruled as unlikely at the time, because attacking through the Ardennes was risky. Ike and Bradley were caught by surprise because since the breakout from Normandy, the German army had been completely incapable of even putting together a defense worth the name, so a major counteroffensive was not on anyone's mind. The partial German rebound in the west was surprising, since quite a lot of people thought that the Allies would have been in Berlin by Christmas. Instead it turned into a bloody slog that lasted until April 1945, when German resistance in the west started to collapse.
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Feb 12, 2014 13:52
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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? Not specifically, but Anthony Beevor does mention this in the Berlin book. The Soviets were not just out of manpower, but their industrial base was shot to poo poo and the workforce wasn't doing that great either. I think post-Bagration, the Soviets started breaking up existing units to redistribute the manpower into other units, because there wasn't enough fresh recruits coming in. The industrial base thing was a result of the entire war industry running full tilt boogie for almost four years around the clock, with little thought put into long-term maintenance because making guns for the immediate survival of the Soviet Union was sort of more important in the short term.
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Feb 17, 2014 22:10
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Pornographic Memory posted:Are there any real examples of land or sea AA totally defeating sizeable air attacks on their own? It seems like lots of armed forces invest crazy amounts of money and resources into AA guns or SAMS or whatever, but at the end of the day none of them are ever as good at killing planes as another airplane. There's maybe a case to be made for the Helsinki raids made by the Soviet Long-Range Airforce (ADD). The wiki is pretty good on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Helsinki_in_World_War_II#The_great_raids_of_February_1944 Basically, AA was good enough to disrupt the attacks to the degree where only 5% of the bombs fell onto the targets, which pretty much counts as a total defeat. Of course, there were other factors such as the ADD never really being as good as the USAAF or the Brits at large-scale bombing. Then there's the Egyptian-Israeli experience where for a while, Egyptian air defenses on Sinai absolutely wrecked the Israeli air force.
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Apr 4, 2014 10:03
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The only way for the Sealion plans to be worse than they were would have been to have Churchill do the planning. That being said, I think the half-assed planning did mostly indicate that there wasn't really anyone who was serious about the whole deal, starting from Hitler.
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Apr 7, 2014 18:34
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Hitler was always kind of baffled about the Brits not accepting his New Order. Hitler, after all, was sort of an anglophile and originally wanted to ally with the UK. History's full of military actions without a clear goal or a clear path to that goal and the air war against the UK was definitively one of them. On the other hand, between the World Wars, there was a whole thing about how wars can be won from the solely from air using strategic bombing, Douhet and all that. In the end, strategic bombing never really paid off.
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Apr 7, 2014 22:22
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