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a travelling HEGEL posted:National debt. That won the Anglo-Dutch wars. Well a Dutch King ended up on the English throne so take what you will from who won what (incidentally that's why the English army takes so much from the Dutch in this period - the post civil-war rehabilitation of it was done by Dutch drillmasters, and they spend the War of Spanish Succession fighting the French in Holland).
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Nov 14, 2013 00:28
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steinrokkan posted:Isn't it the NATO powers that built their AFVs to withstand short burst of activity, but incapable of prolonged operations without maintenance? I though the Soviet design philosophy - at least in the Cold War - was to make sure that their tanks would survive on their own, without engineers for as long as possible - which would make sense, considering their tradition of strategic thinking. That's my understanding of why the autoloader/human loader design split happens. The human can move faster in a pitched battle but obviously gets tired. The autoloader just keeps on going.
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Nov 14, 2013 14:47
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Hogge Wild posted:How useful were pre gunpowder era war engines (catapults, ballistas etc.) on field battles? They didn't exist because you'd construct them at a siege.
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Nov 14, 2013 15:25
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Hob_Gadling posted:It's often quoted as the reason but I don't think it's strictly speaking true. A M829 round weighs about 41 pounds. M1A1 Abrams can carry 40 rounds of ammunition into battle. 40 reloads with a 40 pound weight are simply not that taxing to a person in good shape. The differences would only start to show up after extended periods of heavy physical activity or (more likely) no sleep. Well yeah. Like if you were on day 6 of 7 days to the River Rhine.
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Nov 14, 2013 15:57
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e: ^^ yes, yes, the Romans did use siege weapons in battles. But then the Romans were the kind of people who did this sort of engineering solution. After the Romans it doesn't really happen.SeanBeansShako posted:I believe the final switch over was due to both the killing power of a musket and how easy it was to teach a man to use it. This began much earlier with the Crossbow of course. No this is just plain wrong and misses a massive amount of progress. In really really short form (so still wrong but less so): what you get in the end of the Medieval period/start of the Renaissance is a bunch of things happening that changes warfare - primarily everyone in Europe gets a lot better at producing lots of better-quality metal. So what happens is that what was once the peasant levy portion of your army gets replaces with blocks of pikemen who are probably equipped with mass produced steel helmets and breastplates. That's a bit hard to meaningfully hurt with crossbows, so while they exist, battles start to look a bit more like greek-phalanx style shoving matches. Except. That metalworking revolution is making it easier and easier to mass produce pistols and muskets. They're poo poo and take forever to load, but they'll punch through the armour everyone's wearing these days. So formations of mixed pike/musketmen start to appear where everyone charges into a pushing contest and then gets murdered by point black musket fire - things that people try to avoid if they can possibly help it. Eventually muskets develop to the point where you can reload and fire them two or three times a minute rather than just once, so they start to provide the majority of the killing power in a formation. About the same time people realise that you can put a sharp piece of metal at the end of a musket and it becomes a makeshift pike. That, and the increasing firepower of a musketman mean that cavalry simply stop being able to threaten well-ordered infantry under normal circumstances and combat starts being about regiments firing volleys into each other at anything from 20-150 yards. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Nov 14, 2013 |
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Nov 14, 2013 19:23
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VanSandman posted:The trick is to time your firing mechanism so you can only shoot when you won't hit the propeller. This took a while to work out, actually. And before then you'd armour plate your rotor blades so the bullets didn't damage them. Hope you don't get deflections back into the engine or your own face!
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Nov 16, 2013 02:34
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Ensign Expendable posted:Stalin didn't like having three guns, so one big gun! This is one of the few times that having a dictator approve everything works out. Stalin is shown the 2-3 gun prototypes that look like something from Red Alert and just reacts with 'What on earth are you people doing, just do one big gun!'
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Nov 16, 2013 12:15
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Mans posted:What were their characteristics? I know the Germans tended to make deep, angled trenches and tended to make them as comfortable as possible, since they knew their soldiers would tend to hang around them or a while. It varied greatly depending on where the line was. Allied (particularly British) doctrine was that trenches were just the start-line for the next offensive, so not much official thought was put into mandating a best-practice for trenches. Then you get the fact that there just aren't many German offensives in the West and there's no real learning by experience - what happens is the Allies try to emulate the German system from what they see of it in unsuccessful attacks but get crucial things wrong - which is partly why in 1918 they're still getting it wrong and large numbers of troops get caught too far forwards when Hindenburg makes his last throw of the dice.
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Nov 16, 2013 16:02
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I remember reading someone (I think it was Richard Holmes) who looked into the whole 'what kind of sword, what kind of thrust is best?' thing because it was a big question back in the Napoleonic period and the best answer he could track down a contemporary military writer coming to was 'actually it doesn't matter so much because in a melee you are just going to be hacking at the guy in front of you until he goes down and finesse will probably go out of the window, what matters is that you keep your sword razer sharp (many people did not) so that when you get your hit in it does some damage'.
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Nov 16, 2013 22:18
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One of the official British Army 'lessons learned' from the failure of the Anzio Operation was "No amount of shouting through megaphones will induce troops to advance through a minefield". So someone clearly tried it.
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Nov 17, 2013 12:23
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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:Was any old artillery used (in desperation) in World War II? The military museum in Paris has an old cannon with Russian names and a date from 1945 carved into it. Depends how old you are talking about. As EnsignExpendable has pointed out the Germans made a thing of raiding French stockpiles for guns and welding them onto anything that moved (and the Atlantic wall).
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Nov 17, 2013 18:28
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MassivelyBuckNegro posted:Didn't the Soviets pause outside the city for the duration or the Warsaw uprising? Yes. It remains a point of contention whether or not they did this deliberately or because they'd run to the end of their logistical tether. They certainly didn't resume their advance immediately after the uprising failed; Bagration concludes around half-way through August 1944 and the next main offensive through Poland and into Germany happens in January 1945. The drawback of making a massive advance like the Soviets did is that the problem of getting food and ammunition to your front line from their starting points gets proportionately worse. e: \/\/ the Soviet attitude towards the Polish was 'crush any independent leadership' and Stalin certainly didn't care about the uprising, but the logistical arguments are pretty compelling. The Soviets had reached the end-line of their offensive and after 3 years of getting the poo poo kicked out of them by the Germans every time they overreached they weren't taking any chances. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Nov 18, 2013 |
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Nov 18, 2013 01:30
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Unluckyimmortal posted:Not only that but he threw his uniform cap on the floor and stomped on it, then sulked for an hour before ordering his force to assist Taffy 3. Go take a wander round GiP some day.
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Nov 18, 2013 21:36
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Ghost of Mussolini posted:A total slaughter. It would've made Dieppe look like an extremely well planned and conducted landing. I posted about this on the other thread (I can't link to that post because I'm not on a computer now), but I essentially summarised the appendix from Shattered Sword. To summarise my summary: Also: Japan didn't even have a doctrine for opposed amphibious landings and the army didn't train with the navy to practice. There was no training for the Cruisers on coastal bombardment in support of troops and no lines of communication to actually co-ordinate said naval support. Forget Dieppe, the Japanese plan was essentially a amphibious version of the Somme: 'bombs and shells will wipe out the defenders, you'll just have to wade through several hundred yards of reef to get to your objective'.
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Nov 19, 2013 16:07
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VaultAggie posted:What kind of wooden sailing vessels were ideal for combat during the 16 and 17th centuries? Like, construction material, guns, crews, sail material, etc? Galleons.
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Nov 19, 2013 20:49
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Outside Dawg posted:Mercenaries in WW1 & WW2? I'm surprised no one brought up the Gurkhas. They're not mercenaries, given how they are an incorporated part of the national army.
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Nov 25, 2013 10:29
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Outside Dawg posted:How one defines a mercenary, depends a great deal on whose side they fight. If they are serving under the flags of either India or Nepal(the lands in which they reside) then no they are not mercenaries, serving under the British flag they are indeed mercenaries. And yet you didn't bother to follow the definition in your own link. That's the kind of superficial bad posting that belongs in the D&D post. quote:Art 47. Mercenaries Mercenaries are not people 'paid to fight' because that's literally all professional soldiers. Mercenaries are not incorporated members of the armed forces of a nation, which is that the Ghurka regiment is. 'Specially recruited' to mean to fight in a particular conflict, which the Ghurkas are not.
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Nov 25, 2013 11:45
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SeanBeansShako posted:I think it is more as a cultural thing. I don't think we British see them as Mercenaries. We just see them as soldiers. No it's right there in the Geneva convention. They're not specially recruited to fight in conflicts. They aren't paid more than regular soldiers. They aren't separately organised to the regular army. The Ghurkas and the French Foreign Legion are historical peculiarities but they aren't mercenaries.
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Nov 25, 2013 14:33
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The reason mercenaries in the modern context are illegal and don't get POW rights is because there's only one reason you'd pay a bunch of people to go into a warzone but not give them uniforms or incorporate them into your armed forces, and that's so that you can get them to commit war crimes for you but without a direct connection or chain of accountability leading back to you (or in the WW2 context, where you want to participate in warfighting but not actually declare war). That's your actual harm. If you want to take a holistic approach to the question 'what is a mercenary?' then you need to be asking whether the people you are looking at are being used to circumvent the rules of war in some way.
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Nov 25, 2013 15:30
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Outside Dawg posted:Yes, I believe the current "politically correct" term is Private Military Contractor, the US government (unless something has changed recently that I am unaware of), justifies this by their status as a participatory nation and not a signatory one. Yeah, no. Foreign members of a national military are not mercenaries. You are just wrong on this. There's no 'obscuring the truth of their practices' here, literally all professional soldiers work for their wages, there's no requirement in the Geneva convention that you pass a Nationalist fevor test to be a true soldier. In any case that's just one stage of a multi-stage test you need to go through to know if you are looking at a mercenary. Alchenar fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Nov 25, 2013 |
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Nov 25, 2013 19:31
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sullat posted:What is the consensus on the international brigades in Spain, then? The Condor Legion or the various pro-Republican forces were organized seperately from the locals, I think. Does the Geneva Convention treat ”adventurers” or foreign volunteers as lawful combatants? They were, but then the bulk of the Republican army was being built from scratch while under war-fighting conditions, which confuses things somewhat. To quote the wiki: quote:Later in the war, military discipline tightened and learning Spanish became mandatory. By decree of 23 September 1937, the International Brigades formally became units of the Spanish Foreign Legion.[13] This made them subject to the Spanish Code of Military Justice. However the Spanish Foreign Legion itself sided with the Nationalists throughout the coup and the civil war.[13] The same decree also specified that non-Spanish officers in the Brigades should not exceed Spanish ones by more than 50 per cent[14] That indicates that (if anyone had cared at the time, which they didn't) they were incorporated into the army.
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Nov 26, 2013 00:46
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Arquinsiel posted:The rumoured reason for the Western Allied assault around to the south and into Austria to avoid it makes a lot of sense, assuming the figure thrown around of "one million casualties" was actually calculated pre-Soviet assault. No, Eisenhower and the rest of the Allied high command genuinely believed the Alpine Redoubt was A Thing. Also the moment it became clear that the Germans weren't just going to collapse in the West and allow the Allies through, there was very little enthusiasm for pushing past the boundaries of the agreed occupation zones.
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Nov 27, 2013 02:01
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As a concept, an arrow is just a miniature throwing spear (which is literally a stick with a sharp bit on the end). It isn't therefore that difficult to see that almost any group which makes a spear and has the relevant materials to hand will eventually start making bows and arrows because someone in that group is going to come up with the idea.
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Nov 27, 2013 18:02
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Hess wasn't carrying a peace offer from anyone higher than him in the German government, Hess was literally the no.2 in the German Government.
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Nov 28, 2013 21:36
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Nenonen posted:Yep, there's obviously a ton of possible scenarios. But if your enemy is bound to a strategy of static defense and having no real way of counter-attacking, like the Finnish army was in the Mannerheim line 1939-40, it's a matter of spending a few days or weeks figuring out how to use heavy artillery most effectively. The bunkers are not going to move, and it's too late for the enemy to build back up defensive lines, so you might as well take your time demolishing them if you can't go around them. In that particular scenario it's not a waste of resources for the defender to build fortified lines, as they have no real alternatives. But in the end, it's only going to act as a speed bump and by 13 May 1940 everything is falling apart. Or you just bypass them.
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Nov 28, 2013 22:59
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Nenonen posted:In the case of Mannerheim line, no you don't. Or you get Suomussalmi/Raate road, or you go to Kollaa River only to meet with Simo Häyhä. When it's Metz though...
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Nov 28, 2013 23:33
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Flesnolk posted:How were fortresses at all useful in the age of things like tanks, air power, explosives and reliable artillery? It seems at first stab that holing up in a fortress is completely stupid against any army worth the name by the time things have advanced to WW2-level tech. Well, it's a defensive position that's stronger than it would ordinarily be. Any position will succumb to sufficient firepower, but fortification increased the amounts necessary. I mean if we want to talk about fortresses in WW2 then the big obvious example is the Maginot line, and we all know how that turned out.
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Nov 29, 2013 02:15
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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. Worth bearing in mind that those precision weapons are relatively recent things.
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Nov 29, 2013 15:17
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Kemper Boyd posted: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. Precision weapons have been around for a while, where 'around' means costing tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars each and in very limited supply. The JDAM which made it realistic to convert most of your bombs to a precision format only came out in 1997.
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Nov 30, 2013 12:51
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Ensign Expendable posted:Well you see, it all depends on the definition of a tank destroyer. If you define a tank destroyer as any armoured vehicle armed with a dedicated anti-tank gun then the first such vehicle would be god drat it that's not a real question, is it? I think actually that question depends on how you define the word 'standing' 
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Dec 1, 2013 03:03
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a travelling HEGEL posted:Here is the part in the thread where historians try to do math. In Imperial units no less.
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Dec 2, 2013 01:05
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North Italy is a broad flat basin below the Alps, whereas South Italy is just mountains all the way down. There are obvious infrastructure consequences.
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Dec 3, 2013 22:08
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Pornographic Memory posted:For content, I recently read Beevor's D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, and basically he makes Montgomery sound like a pompous, incompetent rear end all the way through, though with a few random nods to his "undoubted abilities" or something like that, though said abilities are never really supported by the text. So, what exactly was Montgomery good at? I know he made his name beating Rommel in Africa, but how much of that was due to being a good general, and how much was due to America's entry into the war and material superiority over the Germans? I hear and read a lot of disparaging opinions of him, but he had to have something good about him I assume, since the Eight Army went through a few commanders before sticking with Monty. He cared about getting his logistics right. That isn't sexy and it doesn't get him the propaganda love that the traditionally overrated generals get but it means he wins battles. He's slow and deliberate, but given the allied armies were made up of people who weren't generally willing to risk their necks that much he makes the best of what he's given. He's fighting an industrial war where his side has all the advantages, so he fights in a way that low-risk and leverages his material advantages to the full. The one time he doesn't do that it's a failure. He never shows real genius, but equally he was never going to screw everything up aside from his massive ego-tripping pissing off his allies. His best moment is probably his reaction to the Battle of the Bulge (he takes over 2 US Armies that had lost communications with Bradley and gets them to reform the line in the north), his worst is promptly followed by that where he takes credit for the whole battle and rubs his ally's faces in their most embarrassing moment.
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Dec 4, 2013 17:26
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Arquinsiel posted:To expand on this, he was also very VERY concerned with getting the average Tommy home safe since the threat of having Britain collapse post-war via a low birthrate was a real issue. To be fair to him though, he did TRY to make sure he had the logistics for Market Garden, but Bradley decided to tell Patton to ignore specific instructions from Ike and keep pushing, getting himself stuck out in the arse-end of nowhere surrounded and in need of supply. Where did that supply come from? If you guessed "poo poo earmarked for Monty" then you'd be right. That said, the problem with the plan wasn't inherently the supply end of things, it was more how his subcommanders also decided to ignore it and do their own thing on the ground. Whether or not the bridgehead over the Rhine was going to be held or lost is going into pure speculation, so the plan might still have come apart due to logistics in the long-term. Lots of stuff went wrong with Market Garden that didn't necessarily have to go wrong at all, but the premise of the plan was still 'the Germans are beaten and won't try to fight back'. In the grand scheme of things supply was actually the problem because as Monty admitted post-war, it would have been far better to focus on clearing the Scheldt and opening Antwerp for business. Then there would have been supplies for everyone.
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Dec 4, 2013 19:46
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Of course when Monty does focus on the Scheldt he fucks that up constantly and takes forever to clear it. That's because he wastes time on Market Garden and the Germans use the chance to stop everyone running and dig in hard. Pretty much everyone agrees that if it had been the priority from the start then it would have been cleared without much opposition.
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Dec 4, 2013 20:02
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Fangz posted:The scenario where the Allies would accept Nazi surrender to the western allies alone is basically Gay Black Hitler territory, anyway. How would such an arrangement even work? We need to stop the hordes of Red Army soldiers overrunning all of Eastern Europe (who are only there because Germany kicked down their front door)!
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Dec 4, 2013 23:00
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Well the reasons depend for what groups of Germans you're looking at. Nazi leadership and OKW/OKH heads didn't want to surrender because they knew the gallows awaited them should they do so. German generals didn't, blaming the oath they swore to Hitler or some bizarre ideal of honor prevented them from doing so. Really they were afraid of the soviets as much as anyone else in the reich and knew a surrender in the west without the allies joining Germany would cause a morale collapse on the eastern front. The average German soldier was more than happy to surrender to the western allies provided he was presented with a good chance to do so. Not so much in the east as they knew what had been done in the occupied territories and that the soviets would show no mercy if they didn't shoot them out of hand. I have some sympathy with the (self-serving) argument Manstein puts out in his memoir: at what point do you actually turn on Hitler? In 1933? Why? He's just won an election. Because he's ordered you to reoccupy the Rhineland? Nope, Versailles is poo poo and unfair. Anschluss with Austria? Ditto. Bringing the Sudentenland into Germany? See above. When we invade Poland? See above also he's promised us that England and France won't intervene and hey, they didn't the last two times. When we defeat France? Okay we're stuck in a war we don't have a plan for winning but that's not a reason to launch a coup. When we invade the USSR and it doesn't work and also the SS (whitewash the army lots here) have been massacring everyone? Sure, except we're now at war with the USSR and even if I can start a civil war to depose Hitler and even if it works, the consequence of that is that Germany will be immediately defeated and occupied by the USSR. At the point at which it becomes obvious (from the perspective of the German army) that Hitler should be deposed, it doesn't actually help the people of Germany to do so and is a bad option if you have even a slither of hope of being able to force a stalemate on the Eastern front.
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Dec 4, 2013 23:32
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Most housing in the US is at best one layer of brick over plywood with some insulation and drywall behind it. But even thick brickwork isn't going to stop concentrated fire for long, and anything heavier than small arms is going in one side and out the other. cf. Afghanistan, where literally everything in the southern half of the country is effectively a small-arms proof bunker.
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Dec 5, 2013 02:08
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:A KV-2, with a properly placed shell hitting from above, would ruin anyone's day. With the shell hitting from anywhere the concussive impact is going to ruin anyone's day.
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Dec 6, 2013 21:23
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Ensign Expendable posted:Shermans vs Abrams: Math time! But how many jeeps does it take to beat an Abrams?
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Dec 7, 2013 00:46
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