|
Unluckyimmortal posted:I believe they were sunk by destroyer torpedoes, and Yamashiro was heavily damaged by battleship fire somewhere along the line. If you look at how Surigao strait played out, it's really pretty difficult to know for certain which element of the USN task force assigned to cover it actually did for any particular ship because the USN's battle plan and force composition was so completely superior to what the Japanese had available. Fuso was destroyer torpedoes, Yamashiro was basically "all of the above, at once".
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2013 20:15
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 20:19 |
|
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:Has anyone found/bothered looking for the wreck of the Fuso? I've always wondered if that split in two and both halves stayed afloat story was true or not. Anthony Tully's Battle of Surigao Strait debunked that. It's basically a misconception based on bad interpretation that lasted forever because there were literally only 10 Fuso survivors and none of them were listened to much in the west.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2013 21:44
|
|
|
VikingSkull posted:The Battle of Leyte Gulf was always the Kurita at least was hosed by several factors, including
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2013 16:48
|
|
battle in my mind. From the USS Heermann scaring off a Japanese task force, to Halsey's bungling, the Yamato just steaming around doing nothing of consequence.
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:For anyone wondering about these two, Kurita's first flagship was sunk under him on the way to the the Philippines by American submarines. He transferred his flag from the sunk cruiser to Yamato and then stayed awake for the rest of the battle due to being shaken the gently caress up from that and near constant air attacks. Also not having a recognition book for CVEs is the least of his problems there as none of his sub-commanders can tell the difference between a DE and a heavy cruiser (about 300 feet and 13000 tons for you at home). I thought that this was actually due to the CVE/CV fuckup. Since they thought the CVEs were about twice the length they actually wore, they thought everything was more or less twice as big, as well as further away and faster. The gunners corrected for the distance errors, but it may not have percolated up to Kurita. Also if you're wondering why they didn't check the radar, the answer is that Japanese radar of WW2 was poo poo. VikingSkull posted:In the Battle of Surigao Strait, the Japanese Southern Force was a small and outdated screening fleet, tasked with passing through the Strait and linking up with Center Force. However two things worked against them. First was a strict order of radio silence, so they did not know Center Force had just taken a slight mauling and was not where they should have been. Second was that's precisely where 7th Fleet had set up a screen, in the mouth of Leyte Gulf. This part you can read elsewhere about as it's pretty incredible, featuring the last battleship on battleship action in history, as well as the last time a fleet "crossed the T" on an opponent. I'm not sure where you're getting that part about the strict radio silence from. There were several transmissions by Kurita (many of which were intercepted by Nishimura's force) and a few status updates by Nishimura. The Southern Force was also at least partially a decoy mission anyway. ArchangeI posted:Actually, if you consider Battleships to be the decisive weapon in a sea battle - and nothing until December 7th, 1941 seriously put that into doubt - then pouring your limited ressources into the biggest and best battleships human ingenuity can build makes sense. Japan could never win a war of attrition, so they went for a limited number of ships that could hope to stand up to two or three enemy ships. The idea behind the Yamato class was that any challenger would be too big to fit through the Panama Canal. If the US had known their true size earlier we might have put more priority on getting the Montana class built and then who knows what they would have done with them, or if they'd have built fewer aircraft carriers. The Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940 specified the construction of 18 aircraft carriers and 7 battleships, which is a very fortunate ratio. Remember that Pearl Harbor hasn't happened yet, and even Taranto is a few months away. Nevertheless Congress is going all in on aircraft carriers: "The modern development of aircraft has demonstrated conclusively that the backbone of the Navy today is the aircraft carrier. The carrier, with destroyers, cruisers and submarines grouped around it[,] is the spearhead of all modern naval task forces."
|
|
#
¿
Nov 18, 2013 22:52
|
|
|
bewbies posted:I do not remember where I saw it and I cannot find it now, but a few months ago I read a "historical concept" by a Naval War College student that was a pretty interesting study. I'm picturing every torpedoman in Japan getting a spontaneous erection.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2013 00:52
|
|
|
VikingSkull posted:Besides, the US Navy sunk how many ships at extended range because of the air arm of fleet carriers? loving lots, and at ranges way past what a battleship could do. On the plus side, we might have actually gotten to see how Yamato vs Montana would shake out. Probably Montana by a good margin unless someone with torpedoes shows up.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2013 00:58
|
|
|
DerLeo posted:No, the point totally was that they were going to lure the US fleet out of Pearl and force ~~Decisive Battle~~, they just expected to have captured Midway by then. The US move was supposed to be in reaction to the invasion, not a preemption. There was a set of wargame-simulations before the battle. The guy in charge of the simulated US forces decided for one run "what happens if I show up early, let's find out" and managed to kill two carriers. This was ruled "never gonna happen when we do it for real" but Yamamoto ordered two carriers kept in reserve to strike the US forces at all times. Messing about with the armament of those two reserve carriers was a problem on the actual day of Midway, but not to the extent that some suggest.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 19, 2013 23:02
|
|
|
They also have a book about Surigao strait that's worth reading.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 20, 2013 15:18
|
|
|
InspectorBloor posted:I don't think this is fiction. Officers and anyone with authority to get stuff transported to back home stole anything of value. Russian soldiers just looooved watches of all kinds. How would such a russian farmer look at a machine that washes his clothes. The Soviets had edit extra watches out of images like the "Raising a flag over the Reichstag" picture. Fake edit: although some people claim the second watch was a compass.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2013 16:32
|
|
|
a travelling HEGEL posted:Yeah, but 20th century generals are less likely to celebrate it on an aesthetic level. With the Nazis you never know.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2013 19:12
|
|
|
AATREK CURES KIDS posted:Who wins in a fight, a single M1 or 16 Shermans? My money's on the M1 because it has better aim, maneuverability, and it would take a lot of hits or a lucky shot to incapacitate it. I'd go with the M1. ERA seems like it'd loving murder AT shells of WW2 era, the M1 can fire accurately while moving, the M1 can see in the dark, and according to wikipedia the sherman has like 1/5 the penetration needed.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2013 19:40
|
|
|
ArchangeI posted:One would assume that at least one Sherman would get a shot at the side or rear while the M1 is busy murdering all the others, but these kind of contests always devlove into MIC fetishists masturbating about the latest weapon technology. The side isn't going to work, even other Abrams couldn't penetrate the side armor in the Gulf War. I couldn't find info about the rear in a cursory search, but it only has to have 147mm of protection to beat the Sherman. Track hits and then staying the hell away are the Sherman's only hope. As for battlemechs, Return of the Jedi is a classic example of deploying the wrong vehicle for the terrain. Did the Empire deploy ANY vehicles suitable for the terrain? Those Landspeeders certainly weren't.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2013 19:47
|
|
|
Pornographic Memory posted:Shermans are all well and good, but how many tank destroyers would it take to take down an M1? The "best" US tank destroyer has a penetration (at a 30° angle at 457 meters of range) of 244mm. The M1A1 has a frontal protection of 700mm vs HEAT (and apparently comparable side protection) so it's going to come down to "what's the armor on the back like?" I am actually having a lot of trouble finding any info on the rear armor. Interestingly the Sherman and the 90mm Gun Motor Carriage M36 are both faster than the M1 by a small amount, so it's possible for them to get around it even if it's trying to move to keep them away from its rear. They have to stop to shoot accurately though. Phanatic posted:Meh. Just wait for the Abrams to run out of gas. Yeah, that's the big weakness of gas turbines.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2013 20:15
|
|
|
Alekanderu posted:Weren't some M1 tanks disabled by friendly fire to the rear from Bradleys during the Gulf War? How does the penetration of a Bushmaster cannon compare to the Sherman? I can't find a source for that claim. I also am having trouble finding numbers for the M242. It's rated for penetration of 60mm at 2km, but 2km is a long way.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 6, 2013 20:28
|
|
|
Alchenar posted:But how many jeeps does it take to beat an Abrams?  One.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2013 00:50
|
|
|
The main chance of the Zumwalt turning out to be really horrible is its stability. They prioritized stealth over stability and nobody (publicly) knows how well it will deal with heavy seas.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2013 05:04
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:every-man-is-a-bamboo-fighting-conscript fashion. I'm pretty sure they were planning to use a lot more than just adult men there.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2013 19:35
|
|
|
It's about 2.5 hours outside london, but if you can go the Tank Museum is one of my dreams to visit.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 31, 2013 22:02
|
|
|
DerLeo posted:As it happens, part of the plan for Jutland was that before the Grand Fleet got to the Germans, they would have traveled over a pre-placed submarine line and were supposed to get some dreadnoughts sunk, evening the odds before the real battle. Unluckily, the German fleet was forced by weather to leave port later than was planned and the submarines were within a day of being forced to return to Germany to resupply, and managed to hit precisely 0 British ships. Sorta the reverse happened before Midway - IIRC the Japanese subs got into position right after the American carriers had sailed by.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 1, 2014 00:40
|
|
|
What was the loss rate like for WWI German subs? IIRC the WW2 loss rate was something horrifying like 97% of subs that ever went out to sea were eventually lost at sea.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2014 03:09
|
|
|
Fangz posted:Would the Germans have been more effective if they adopted the naval mine methodology the US deployed against the Japanese? They'd need long ranged four engined heavy bombers and local air superiority wouldn't they? That seems to have been rather a sticky problem for them.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 3, 2014 22:33
|
|
|
Mojo Threepwood posted:I had a question regarding the fate of the French fleet in World War II , after France's surrender. It seemed odd that such a mobile asset wasn't moved to Allied ports to fight on. Was that because of Anglo-French relations, or did France fear German retailation if they gave the fleet away? The British tried to insist that the French fleet come over, but the admiral in charge wasn't willing to do that without explicit orders to, and the British admiral's orders were something to the effect of "if they won't do it, immediately blow it all up."
|
|
#
¿
Jan 13, 2014 20:32
|
|
|
Mojo Threepwood posted:Another question, is the image of Axis prisoners held in USA and Canada being so impressed by their treatment that they decided to migrate post-war accurate? Like the ordinary infantry caught in 1942 in Africa and locked up in Alabama, were there high odds they would bring families over later? I remember reading a book about the POW experience in the US and such. Apparently the appeal of living in a country that hadn't been bombed to poo poo/invaded by soviets/blockaded was pretty strong. There was a general sense of "man holy poo poo look at all this stuff that's normal and intact". Another fun thing was dealing with people who had escaped from the POW camps after the war ended. Remember that it's a duty of a soldier to try to escape when captured, so you can't charge them with any crime for escaping. wdarkk fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Jan 14, 2014 |
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2014 04:50
|
|
|
The rearming clusterfuck also contributed to the loss of the carriers - there were simply more bombs outside of the protected storage areas than there should have been.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2014 00:41
|
|
|
brozozo posted:Right, equipping the dive bombers on the flight deck can throw a pretty big wrench into flight deck cycles. However, I'm curious as to why the Japanese equipped their dive bombers in this fashion. What was the reasoning behind it? The authors mention that Japanese carriers had ordnance lifts to the flight deck to deal with the dive bombers, and since they mention it so many times I'm guessing American carriers didn't operate this way. IIRC the Dive Bomber they used couldn't fold its wings due to the requirements of load during a dive. So it may be there just wasn't room to do it on the hanger deck.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2014 00:56
|
|
|
Slavvy posted:If they landed on a beach, how were they supposed to get reversed back into the water? How do you maneuver something like that at low speed without a tugboat, in general? Thrust reversers?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 26, 2014 23:48
|
|
|
Slavvy posted:In a place like Afghanistan, horses would realistically be much better for special operations with limited logistical support, but I don't think it meshes well with the US military's techno-fetishism. You can't really have a laser guided horse. Can't you do incredibly expensive Kevlar armor for them like they do for dogs?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2014 22:57
|
|
|
Davin Valkri posted:How does this sort of over-reporting even happen? I can sort of understand it for ships and planes--if multiple craft are engaging one enemy, they may each claim it for themselves and it may end up reported as "one each" instead of "one between us"--but for army units it seems like under-reporting enemy damage should be more frequent, since you can't confirm, e.g. a tank or gun that is heavily damaged but withdrawn in good order, then found too damaged to economically repair and scrapped, or enemy soldiers that retire in good order but of which most are sent home due to battle wounds. It's part perception issue (he wasn't there after I shot at him, so I must have dropped him!) and part 18-25 men under high stress having bravado/bragging going on.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2014 00:11
|
|
|
So the movie isn't that good? Shame, I really would like a movie on that subject. How's the book?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2014 21:06
|
|
|
steinrokkan posted:So the space Yamato is meant to be the ACTUAL Yamato? Thought it was just a Yamato themed spaceship. I imagine there would be some issues with airtightness even during her heydays. IIRC they built a spaceship inside the hulk of the Yamato to camouflage the fact that they were building a spaceship. So it's actually a spaceship wearing the Yamato's skin. It still wouldn't work because the Yamato exploded after sinking, but they didn't know that when they did the show the first time.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2014 19:41
|
|
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:She sank in one piece and upright even. A tiny bit of the stern broke off, which was apparently a common problem for German heavy ships of that era. 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2014 19:52
|
|
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:Still its better than IJN Humpty Dumpty over there I was checking Musashi to see if it would be intact, but apparently "At 1936, MUSASHI capsizes to port and sinks by the bow in 4,430 feet of water in the Visayan Sea at 13-07N, 122-32E. Two underwater explosions are heard." Japanese ships just seem more prone to exploding. EDIT: Ainsley McTree posted:Maybe I'm just not thinking about it correctly—my image of a naval battle (which I realize may be misshapen by hollywood or other bad sources) of is of two lines of ships sailing towards each other from opposite directions, and trading shots as they pass each other before breaking into a melee; the lead ship of either line would take the most damage, because it's going to get shot at by the longest series of un-damaged ships with fresh crews at the ready, while ships further back in the line would get shot at by fewer ships, which have already been weakened by being shot at by the ships in front of them as they passed by. Due to how sails work, I'm not sure that you could do the bolded part at all. IIRC they always sailed in the same direction more or less.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 27, 2014 19:58
|
|
.
|
Fangz posted:Any attack on nuclear silos would by most doctrines trigger an immediate LAUNCH EVERYTHING response. If it's special forces doing it, what do you do when you're not sure WHO is doing the attacking yet? Although the whole thing seems insanely risky since it's quite possible that the decision to do something like that can't be concealed.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 3, 2014 16:10
|
|
|
Koesj posted:Special forces attacking what, missile silos? Are they part of a massive, nationwide fifth column or something? Any serious power will have redundancies in their nuclear capability. Yeah, I was just thinking about it hypothetically.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 3, 2014 16:27
|
|
|
Taerkar posted:When you're dealing with naval-caliber weapons, the size of the projectile starts to matter a lot more for armor penetration than anything else. In no small part because of how hard it is to get to the higher velocities that you would see with tank guns. This means that you can roughly guess how well a shell will penetrate based upon diameter alone. Now there are extra qualifiers that go into this, such as the quality of metal and some other special things (Which is why the Iowa's 16" shells are about as good at penetrating as the Yamato's 18"), but it's a generally understood idea. So at that size it's starting to be an impact depth thing?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 3, 2014 22:17
|
|
|
CoolCab posted:Where would Sealion even have landed? How could they possibly protect troop transports even with air superiority, given the Royal Navy was a thing? It seems like Sealion is like Unthinkable: never going to work, even if everything broke in your direction. There was an analysis that I think was posted in this thread or the old thread: Why Sealion is Not an Option for Hitler to Win the War by Alison Brooks. Apparently part of the plan was to just sail barges into Dover. It's not 100% clear on where the landings were actually agreed to take place, but notes Hitler favored this proposal: quote:The Wehrmacht wanted a broad-front landing (it proposed Ramsgate to Portand - 275 miles).
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2014 16:41
|
|
|
Slim Jim Pickens posted:They're all things like "The landing craft are river barges", and "Get the Luftwaffe to handle everything". My favorite might be "the troops on the barges are ordered to shoot at any unidentified ships at night." Either that or "the crossing will take literally 30 hours."
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2014 16:50
|
|
|
Didn't they have a big lag in aircraft engines? Anyway I liked Japan at War: An Oral History although it's not 100% rigorous.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 10, 2014 18:19
|
|
|
Trench_Rat posted:sorry to revive the horse_chat.txt but the PAP (peoples armed police) has 2 cav battalions for border patrol Don't they also use crossbows for maximum oldschoolness?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2014 20:45
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 20:19 |
|
|
Libluini posted:I've read that book! It's really good. Just wait until you come to the point where Russia executes it's own militias after they've won. It really makes you happy you don't have to live in 19th century Russia. It reminds me of the villains' plot from the new Captain America movie. Then again a lot of Russian/Soviet leaders could be cartoon supervillains.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 20, 2014 05:27
|
|