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GhostofJohnMuir posted:It was the Civil War version of "Let us march into this desert land, we will be greeted as liberators," with even worse success. Lol, I just finished a book about the French intervention in Mexico which was yet another desert clusterfuck happening at the same time. ( Should we enter Emperor Maximilian in the goony leader contest?)
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Nov 4, 2014 21:29
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So why is there not more popular interest in the period during which dudes on horseback in full plate armor wielded guns in both hands?
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Nov 5, 2014 03:24
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Libluini posted:Maybe laser rifles will be a part of the next generation? Like powered exoskeletons, it would take a quantum leap in battery tech. A low power laser specifically for blinding is more practical, but I think there are treaties and conventions against it.
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Nov 5, 2014 20:44
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HEY GAL posted:Not both hands, since you need a hand to hold the reins. Since you can't reload on horseback, the number of pistols you have is the number of shots you can take. Then you throw them at people (no, really. That was recommended). Were the horses trained to respond to knees alone in close combat like medieval warhorses? (I realize now I have a lot of questions about how cavalry of this era bred, obtained, and trained their horses.) Also, I thought the whole idea of the caracole was to fire, turn around, reload, then turn back for another go? I understand this was generally replaced tactically with "fire, ditch pistols, charge with sword" in the 17th century, but reloading while mounted was at least possible, no?
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Nov 6, 2014 01:50
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Libluini posted:Edit: Crimea. E:fb
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Nov 18, 2014 22:56
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Weren't they basically neutron bombs? The idea being the incoming warheads were moving way too fast to stop with the blast wave, but the neutron radiation would make their cores go off prematurely and fizzle. Just a reminder, there's a huge and awesome thread in TFR about crazy cold war air force stuff.
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Nov 20, 2014 18:14
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my dad posted:Speaking of the US civil war, someone told me there was a former Confederate general who led a black militia against a white supremacist riot sometime after the end of the war. Is this bullshit or was there some bizarre set of circumstances that might be interesting to hear about? General James Longstreet, the riot in New Orleans was referred to as the Battle of Liberty Place. Longstreet's reputation as a general was greatly harmed by Lost Causers pissed off by his postwar Republicanism. E: beaten, always beaten
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Nov 26, 2014 19:47
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Also, school funding formulas vary by state. Here in New Jersey, statewide taxes pay for a huge portion of the costs in underperforming urban districts. The schools here are still terrible after decades of funding equal or better than that of suburban districts, though. OctaMurk posted:Also went to school in Massachusetts, the version we got was that the South panicked and went to war so they could own slaves even though Lincoln didn't intend to illegalize slavery, and Sherman was a hero who won the war and saved the nation and also pioneered all of modern warfare, and that Sherman's March to the Sea was in fact entirely and surprisingly humane in the history of total warfare. Not sure how much of that (about Sherman) is actually true but it seems true. This is pretty accurate, a little hyperbolic about Sherman, but generally reasonable. Lincoln's stated intentions were not to restrict slavery in the south, but to stop its expansion to the territories. Sherman was pretty rad, but you pretty much have to spend equal time fellating Grant to be an honest and evenhanded historian. Yes, the march to the sea was not nearly as bad as the popular imagination has it. Few deaths, but a tremendous amount of property being seized, destroyed, or set free from bondage, depending on the class of property in question.
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Nov 26, 2014 22:10
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I just picked up Team Yankee at a used book sale, so all of this NATO/ Soviet chat couldn't be better timed. Question- is there a consensus emerging about why Soviet equipped armies in Middle East conflicts sucked so bad, or is that still in the process of frustratingly unproductive arguments about export models?
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Dec 2, 2014 18:52
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1493 had a bit about samurai who were abroad at the time Japan was closed to foreign trade being unable to return and instead finding work in the new world guarding Spanish silver shipments. There was an enormous amount of military effort put into guarding the gold and silver, but it was mostly naval or port fortifications, not ground troops. As the mines got less productive and more money was spent to provide for the colonies themselves, Spain got less and less of the desperately needed cash. This does give us the neat story of the time the duke of Alba walked in on Charles V, who was staring intently out the window for some time. He asked the emperor what he was looking at. "I'm trying to find the walls of Cartagena. For what I'm spending they should be visible from here."
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Dec 5, 2014 18:38
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I'm guessing the formations would have generally been tighter in the 16th century when they were almost all pike?
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Dec 6, 2014 04:56
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I think its worth noting that the dude described atheism as the belief that the soul dies with the body, not that the soul does not exist. It's kind of like the contemporary reformers who condemned witch hunts as mass paranoia and miscarriage of justice without questioning the existence of witchcraft.
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Dec 8, 2014 15:30
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my dad posted:I don't think they had specific terminology for human consciousness beyond the word 'soul'. Yep, and I wonder when the distinction came into being, and what alternate definitions of the soul were articulated in that period. I'm also curious how the idea of "heavenly bodies" and the second coming/resurrection interact with it. I should probably ask the Christianity thread.
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Dec 8, 2014 16:48
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HEY GAL posted:
Wasn't there a guy somewhat later who put a dying man on a scale so he could watch it change at the moment of death and determine the exact weight of one (1) soul?
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Dec 8, 2014 20:54
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Tomn posted:That makes me curious - what percentage of the original "pre-war" armies survived the conflict? In both the IJA and the Red Army in particular, but if anyone has those numbers for the other major belligerents in WWII, that'd be interesting. I've heard a figure of 3% of the Red Army at the start of the war making it through to V-E day without being killed, wounded, or captured.
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Dec 13, 2014 14:16
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I'm midway through Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom and finished God's Chinese Son a while back. This taps out my local library, so are there any other reasonably accessible books I could track down about the Tai Ping Rebellion? Something about Shi Dakai would be great, but I'm not picky. (I guess I could just learn Chinese, but it's really hard.)
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Dec 18, 2014 02:28
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Cythereal posted:Found a very interesting military history book in the university library I work at that I recall this thread recommending earlier - Shattered Sword, an examination of the Battle of Midway. Not sure if it's still recommended or not, but it's been a very enjoyable read so far. Yes, it owns.
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Dec 18, 2014 22:45
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Comstar posted:That book really deserves a movie to be made about it (I mean, a modern, better one). Only if 45 minutes into the movie, right before the first bombs land, text scrolls up the screen saying "Doctrine isn't an exciting topic, but it is important to understanding why Kido Butai fought the battle the way they did. Please pay attention for this 20 minute lecture."
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Dec 19, 2014 04:11
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Cythereal posted:"Coordinated American strikes" and "the Battle of Midway" are two concepts which do not go together, I've learned. Yeah, both sides were a clusterfuck compared to late war US carrier operations. Japan would probably have hosed up US carriers just as bad if they had gotten their strikes out. I just finished Herbert Bix's biography of Hirohito, and it really emphasized how lovely the overall Japanese decision making process was. Not to get too Orientalist, but its a problem when your standard cultural response to an impossible command is to keep your mouth shut, try your best, and fail.
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Dec 19, 2014 22:10
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Disinterested posted:One thing that will immediately spring to mind when you read these texts is how unhelpful 'Asian culture' would be as a cipher for what is happening there (and, amusingly, Germany has its own small influence what is happening in Japan in the late 19th century). Did Protocols of the Elders of Zion make its way to Japan via Germany or direct from Russia? It's really weird to have Japanese dudes blaming the empire's problems on the approximately zero Jews in Japan. You're all right to correct me that it's way too broad to attribute things to Asian or Japanese culture in general, but there were definitely problems when it came to setting achievable goals and reevaluating them as circumstances changed. Hirohito would send his brothers out on fact finding trips, because the official channels were too often reluctant to report the full extent of their problems to the emperor. Whether Confucian face-saving or just generic human rear end-covering, it was a problem.
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Dec 20, 2014 15:17
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steinrokkan posted:Does the concept of face actually have anything to do with eastern philosophies? It seems to be just a regional slang term for the universals of dignity, prestige, thymos... As for face in general, there's similar concepts in every culture, but I don't know if the Venn diagram would overlap exactly. The 19th century Europeans who imported the expression "save face" into English apparently felt they didn't already have a word for it.
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Dec 20, 2014 15:34
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Disinterested posted:
Definitely going to check this out. Bix talked a lot about the influence of Nichiren Buddhists in the Japanese government, but didn't go into the nature and justification of their beliefs. I totally get that the anti-semitism is a very minor footnote to Japanese right wing ideology, it's still kinda weird. the JJ posted:And no, they blamed a lot of poo poo for their failures. Go read the Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa. The white devil was one but they didn't really have a betrayal myth the way the Nazi's did so much as a Napoleon complex/I wanna be one of the cool kids thing going on w/r/t Prussia, Great Britain, the USA and before that China. Yukichi Fukuzawa died in 1901. I was under the impression that resentment of and rhetoric regarding "the white race" ramped up later, post WWI, with the rejection of their racial equality clause at Versailles and perceived raw deal with respect to German territories in Asia. the JJ posted:Sure, but that poo poo isn't inherent to Japan (and it can wax and wane and turn on a dime, see also, Japan 1860's->20xx) The Meiji era kicked off when a bunch of clans said gently caress you to the shogun, the expansions in China were kicked off by groups of pissed off junior commanders, Japan went from a bombed out shithole to eating huge chunks of the American market based on relentless innovation for a good while. Do they have problems? Yeah, but go look at Lehman Brothers or Enron or the clusterfuck that is the American security apparatus post-9/11 and tell me that that's unique to the slanteyes. No one here is arguing that Japanese are untermenschen or that some cultural generalizations hold true always and explain all of Japanese history. We're just trying to understand a series of increasingly bad decisions during 1930s and 40s. I do agree that there are a number of high profile incidents of policy being hijacked from below that suggest the breakdown of the decision making progress went the other way too, with superiors unwilling to reign in subordinates who exceeded their mandates. Why? A desire to avoid internal conflict?
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Dec 20, 2014 19:14
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Saint Celestine posted:Was that really a war of attrition though? I thought about that, but the Japanese just straight up kicked Russia's teeth in. They did throw away thousands of men taking Port Arthur.
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Dec 20, 2014 20:02
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Most people on my American father's side were too young or too old for WWII. Had a great uncle in the marines in the Pacific and another on a destroyer, but don't know many details. My German grandfather's side of the family was chock full of nazis, some of which died, but I don't know too many details. He volunteered to join a Luftwaffe unit in France once he hit conscription age, partly out of patriotism but mostly out of "dear god send me anywhere but east." He drove a truck and eventually got taken prisoner by an American soldier, the first black man he ever saw. I spoke with my German grandmother a few years ago and wrote up a fairly detailed story of her wartime experiences, but I've changed computers and the hard copy is in a box somewhere. The gist was something like this: Her family was dirt poor, thanks to an uncle who got drunk one night and decided to let everyone in the bar know how he really felt about the nazis. The family got out of that trouble by signing over the farm to a local official in exchange for one (1) goose. They were living within spitting distance of the French border, so when war came they were temporarily evacuated to a village in Austria. She vividly remembered that Christmas because it was a totally rad traditional Austrian celebration with Krampus and everything. My great grandfather ended up being sent to Italy, where he died at Monte Cassino. The family didn't find out the details until years later, thanks to chance meeting on a bus with a veteran from the same unit. It seems he was with the trucks which were being kept in an orchard to camouflage them. Not well enough, apparently, as an American fighter plane ended up strafing them and killing him. Meanwhile my teenage grandmother was dealing with the occasional bombing raid, and they were so close to the border they ended up using an old prewar bunker as a bomb shelter. Eventually the allies arrived and the town was occupied by French troops from Morocco. Fortunately for my grandmother, she had a French surname, so the French put a mark on the front door indicating that the house was off limits. The rest of the town suffered widespread looting and a few rapes. The one anecdote that really sticks in my mind is how one night she was out late on some errand when bombs started dropping. She immediately jumped into a ditch by the side of the road, only to find it was already occupied by a dead cow. She was too terrified to move until morning, and spent the whole night next to the rotting animal. That's what I think about when I think about war.
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Dec 23, 2014 02:23
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FAUXTON posted:There's a game called "This War of Mine" that goes with the whole not-soldier take on war. You're just some schmoe caught in a war so you need to avoid getting shot while foraging for food and fuel and scrap so you don't starve/get mugged/freeze to death. Sounds interesting. The title jogs my memory about a book I read a long time ago that goons who post itt might find interesting. The Dead Are Mine, by James E. Ross, is an autobiographical novel about working in a graves registration unit at the Anzio beachhead (It was a busy time for graves). The author wrote it while doing life in prison for murder, and it's a very bleak, raw perspective on the war.
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Dec 23, 2014 04:48
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Kaal posted:My entire family, on both sides: I have a single cousin that had a quiet peacetime service in the US Marine Corps, and apparently one of my great-great-uncles rode with Teddy Roosevelt in the Rough Riders. Other than that it's all farmers and fishermen. I had a great great grandfather that everyone thought fought in the Spanish American war, based on the dates of enlistment, but then we dug up some additional paperwork that showed it was actually the Boxer Rebellion. Wish I had more info on that.
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Dec 24, 2014 05:23
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I received a family anecdote about my great uncle who was a marine in the pacific. He was a radioman (which could be hazardous since the nice tall antenna drew a lot of attention) and participated in 7 combat landings without getting a scratch. That was fortunate, because it turns out that his dog tags had the wrong blood type on them. I'm sure somebody somewhere died because of that.
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Dec 26, 2014 02:06
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:On the note how is Hirohito: The Making of Modern Japan and is that a good overview of Japan during the war? I just read this and it's pretty good. (For some reason my local library had this 700 page book filed in the children's section. ) It is very much a biography and not a general history, but major events are at least summarized. Definitely portrays Hirohito as culpable for Japan's actions, but notes that the system was designed so that the emperor would never be directly responsible for a decision, as the emperor was supposed to be above mundane politics. Instead, he would express his opinions through informal channels, and a short time later ministers would submit a very similar official recommendation that Hirohito would approve. To an outside observer expecting a figurehead constitutional monarch, that's what he'd look like. The book also shows how much turnover there was in top leadership over the period, and it strains credulity to suggest that the one person continually in a position of power for the whole era somehow had nothing to do with any of it. The Imperial Household Agency recently released a huge official record of Hirohito's reign, but supposedly the years from 1930-1945 are surprisingly light. I know there are more knowledgable goons who can weigh in.
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Jan 3, 2015 16:15
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Were you supposed to turn a share of the plunder over to your officers in this era?
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Jan 20, 2015 14:58
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Is there anything wrong with Turtledove outside of being a terrible writer?
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Jan 22, 2015 04:34
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Xotl posted:I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. Like, insane political views or bizarre sexual fetishes that crop up constantly. Once you start dealing with sci fi/alternate history authors, things frequently get way way worse than just run of the mill bad writing.
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Jan 22, 2015 05:10
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HEY GAL posted:They get a salary. Was tipping customary? Were the possessions of executed soldiers dealt with differently than any other dead soldier?
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Jan 28, 2015 20:05
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During the siege of Nanjing during the Taiping rebellion the city was so depopulated that the defenders started planting rice inside the walls and could probably have fed themselves indefinitely.
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Jan 31, 2015 01:38
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JaucheCharly posted:There's a pic of some coastal fortification that was taken after some british sailors stormed it in some war, where there's one of these repeating crossbows lying on the parapet. Boxer rebellion or something? I didn't save it, but it's out there. The photographer was famous for his shots of battles, he'd rearrange how corpses were lying, to make it look more dramatic. The Taku forts from the second opium war, iirc.
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Feb 2, 2015 22:35
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Japanese sub doctrine makes sense in the context of betting everything on one decisive battle. Like the rest of their war effort, once that battle was lost, any theoretical improvement in doctrine would only help them lose more slowly. Its interesting that so much of Japanese planning seems cognizant that they were taking a low percentage shot, but not a lot of consideration on how to extricate themselves if it failed. Can anyone think of a good case where the opposite was true, i.e. a war plan fails miserably but the losing side still ends the war in decent position?
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Feb 6, 2015 17:28
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Sometimes, both sides are full of simian goons who don't know what they're doing.
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Feb 14, 2015 01:59
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HEY GAL posted:Cav actually gets more important in the last third of the Thirty Years' War, interestingly enough. You start seeing smaller, (ideally) better-disciplined troops with a whole lot of cavalry in them. No idea why. According to Wilson, it was in part because cavalry can forage farther afield than infantry and are easier to support in areas that have been pretty thoroughly devastated by that point.
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Feb 17, 2015 22:34
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Azran posted:
Boy did they ever, mostly in the 16th and 17th centuries. I'm sure Hey Gal will be by to tell you all about this period and why it owns.  e: can someone who knows more about later periods tell me if Napoleonic cuirassier breastplates were any use against contemporary small arms, or were they just for deflecting lances/sabres? P-Mack fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Mar 4, 2015 |
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Mar 4, 2015 14:27
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Trin Tragula posted:Cutting barbed wire with artillery shells was more than possible (as we're going to see in six days). When it failed, it was usually due to some combination of too many dud shells/guns improperly registered/guns themselves inaccurate/not enough ordnance for the actual amount of wire. The basic concept was sound and was proven repeatedly. Didn't the British also wrongly assume that shrapnel shells would be better than HE at cutting wire, the first few times they tried it?
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Mar 4, 2015 20:19
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Kanine posted:I remember hearing somewhere that bladed weapons called "messer" just means knife in German, and the reason for this was that the laws of the land stopped certain people from carrying longer blades and the "messer" being technically a long knife was a loophole to get around this? I might be wrong but that's why I'm asking. My understanding is it was not so much the length that made it a knife, but some stuff but having to do with it being single edged and the way the hilt and grip were constructed. So a peasant could legally carry it in places where true swords were reserved for the upper classes.
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Mar 19, 2015 14:32
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