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Arquinsiel posted:1: depends who you ask. 2: were at war against Germany as part of the terms of the Continuation War ending. 3: From 1944-1945. Well, to be fair, Nazi Germany, that regime well known for its Bolshevism? If they did mean that it's pretty badly phrased.
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Dec 12, 2013 19:45
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Flesnolk posted:Does anybody? For how important it was politically and given how it was the origin of the British Army as we know it today not a whole lot of people seem to actually be all that interested in it for some reason. I do, but then I'm more interested in the political aspect. The only time England's been a Republic after all 
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Dec 12, 2013 19:54
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Koramei posted:Was there actually major opposition to the occupation of Japan? I mean it obviously didn't all go perfectly, but I've heard it described as "the only successful foreign occupation in history". That seems a bit hyperbolic given how much history there is in the world. It's just usually foreign occupations result in the occupiers eventually no longer being foreign (see 1066 for example).
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Dec 14, 2013 11:04
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AATREK CURES KIDS posted:English is a bit like this, but only when touring foreign countries, since regional dialects cover large areas. If I ever meet another Albertan while abroad the speech becomes a lot faster and slangier, and I'm sure the effect is more pronounced for less Americanized dialects of English. That depends on the country in question. My mum couldn't make head nor tail of my Geordie granddad for the first decade or so of her marriage. And let's not even mention Rab C Nesbitt...
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Dec 31, 2013 19:13
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wdarkk posted: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. You don't really need 'long range' if you're trying to mine the Channel from bases in France. It's like two miles across. Dead right on the 'air superiority' thing, though, and relatedly 'sea superiority' in order to prevent minesweepers doing their thing - the US had more or less knocked the IJN out of commission by the end of the war, that was never more than a pipedream for the Germans and would have been damned hard even if they'd had air superiority.
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Jan 4, 2014 19:17
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Fat Twitter Man posted:There are a couple of historical records from the POV of the Sea Peoples. An epic poem which was written down a few centuries later and survives to this day details the Akhaioi, a bunch of pirates and raiders, destroying and plundering the Hittite city of Wilusa. There are also first-person accounts by some of the Shasu nomads who overran the Egyptian province of Canaan and destroyed most of its cities. I was under the impression we didn't even know for sure who the Sea Peoples were. What language were these accounts written in? 
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Jan 4, 2014 19:19
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sullat posted:They were oral histories, eventually recorded in Greek. The modern names for them are ”the Iliad” and ”The Odyssey”. I'm going to go ahead and say it's a hell of a stretch to say that the Iliad is definitely the same as a first-hand account of the Sea Peoples as recorded in ancient Egyptian history.
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Jan 4, 2014 21:22
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The Entire Universe posted:I wonder if it was some kind of coincidence that a handful of cultures from all over that corner of the Med decided to run sailing raids and it's just a fluke of a historical blind spot that the cultures doing the raiding aren't represented in the record for one reason or another (maybe they wrote everything on wood or something) You would be amazed how much wasn't written down by ancient cultures, at least not that survived to us. We have zilch from ancient Carthage, for instance, a civilised and hegenomic trading power of its time, let alone random sea raiders. Hell, we have very little from the pagan Viking era and that was centuries and centuries later. We have a tiny fraction available to us of what was ever written down in the ancient world, in an era in which far far fewer people knew how to write than today.
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Jan 4, 2014 21:31
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Koramei posted:And they weren't "random sea raiders". They completely broke down Mycenaean Greece, the Hittites, and permanently crippled Egypt right after what was pretty much its zenith. The reason there aren't many records of them is because there was nobody around to make any. ( I'm not saying they weren't important; that wasn't very well phrased, I agree. I am saying we have no reason to think they were literate. You don't need to be literate to gently caress literate people over. Edit: and if we're talking about Mycenae, to name one bronze age civilisation, yes, they did write down quite a lot, but it was like 'received by the temple: 100 oxen, 50 jars of olive oil'. Not, like, useful stuff/poems/first-hand accounts of military anything. Egypt and the Near East in general are somewhat different, of course. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Jan 4, 2014 |
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Jan 4, 2014 22:17
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) I'm only half exaggerating. In any case they were important.
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Mustang posted:But aren't the events they depict around the same time period? The wikipedia page on the Sea People's suggests some Greek groups may have been one of the Sea Peoples. May have been. We don't know poo poo. That the Iliad is based on the reality of Bronze Age Greece is only a supposition based on the names of the Greek groups mentioned within it. We don't even know what century Homer wrote in for sure or even if he even actually existed, though most people seem to believe he post-dated the actual bronze age and was writing about what were only legends/ancient history in his own era. We are in no position to impute even faintly, vaguely, something in the region of 'the Iliad may have perhaps been referring to the same people as those the ancient Egyptians called the Sea Peoples'. We just don't have the evidence to be sure. Welcome to the ancient world.
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Jan 4, 2014 22:26
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Libluini posted:To be fair, it could have been worse. Imagine Imperial Germany trying to occupy a country like the USA, were everyone has a gun. Those poor, German officers would get nightmares from all those Franctireurs hiding in every canyon! Everyone had a gun back then in Europe too. Gun control didn't become much of a thing til like the 30s at the earliest.
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Jan 20, 2014 20:29
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Nenonen posted:That sounds suspect. Everyone never had a gun on the whole continent, let alone one suitable for military operations. Eg. Finnish independence activists had pretty much no useful rifles at the time of Russo-Japanese war despite the country being a hunter's heaven. Japan wanted to support insurgence within the Russian empire so they acquired a boatload of rifles and ammo to be delivered to the insurgents, but the plan failed and the weapons ended up in Russian hands. I meant it more like the guy I was responding to; its not like literally all Americans have guns now, but they're easy for most people to obtain and way more common than in modern Europe. Id say that was also true of 1914/1870 France.
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Jan 20, 2014 21:01
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Raskolnikov38 posted:I thought the main reason for the existence of attack helicopters was that dumb Key West agreement and the later one from the 60s that the US army and Air Force signed. Uh except lots of countries that aren't the US have them? The Key West agreement didn't have much to do with the development of the Hind.
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Feb 4, 2014 22:39
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I Demand Food posted:There was, but what the US supplied the other Allies via Lend-Lease typically far outweighed the monetary value of what they got back in return. It really was about supporting the war effort against Germany and Japan more than anything. The US also got Spitfires - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Supermarine_Spitfire_operators#.C2.A0United_States Not to mention everything the UK knew about both radar and nuclear weapons (i.e. the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_Alloys project), in both of which the UK was way ahead of the US at the time. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Feb 6, 2014 |
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Feb 6, 2014 21:54
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ArchangeI posted:Which makes me wonder why the British went with a Skijump design for the QEs. The whole thing ties them to the success of the F-35B to an unreasonable degree. If they had gone CATOBAR they would have had the option of running Rafales (and France would probably throw in a years supply of tea for every sailor on the ship, too) or F-18s. If they really want a stealth-ish fighter to fly off their carrier, they could still get the F-35C. They're actually built with the space for CATOBARs (with the F-35C in mind not the Rafael, though), and a few years ago the plan was to actually install them. Then the catapults sounded like they'd be more expensive than planned, so in a fit of austerity the government downgraded back to F-35Bs and ski ramps again (never mind how much more expensive/limiting the air wing has to be because of that). I wonder how feasible it would be to refit down the line and put CATOBARs back in if STOVL turns out to suck (it'll probably suck).
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Feb 20, 2014 22:13
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khwarezm posted:Meanwhile the Communists bided their time regaining strength after the defeats and Long march from the 30s, with a few propaganda attacks on the Japanese to remind people they still existed but nothing major. Well, given that the Communists in most other areas of Axis-occupied territory in World War 2 were at the forefront of the resistance, and had a lot of goodwill afterwards in many places because of it... Granted, the Japanese weren't explicitly dedicated and formed for the purpose of crushing Communism in quite the same way the Nazis were.
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Mar 1, 2014 22:42
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steinrokkan posted:The Japanese organized massive pacification campaigns that were neither in style nor in scale different from what the Germans were doing in the USSR to the rural population. Yep, sure, they were absolute shitheads, but (I would presume) this was directed equally at Chiang Kai-Shek's guys as the communists. No 'shoot the commissars' order or anything and no specific ideological singling out of Communists over everyone else.
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Mar 1, 2014 23:00
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Bacarruda posted:Japan and the US were broadly equal in 1941. Japan lead in some areas (torpedoes, aircraft) and lagged in others (small arms, artillery, radar). But by 1945, the US was far and away superior (radar, VT fuses, etc.). To be fair, in the case of radar tech in particular and some other areas (like the atom bomb!), the US got a lot of free help/classified technology from the UK that Japan didn't get from Germany.
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Apr 10, 2014 19:24
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The Merry Marauder posted:Southampton is. Southampton is a civilian port, Portsmouth is the RN one.
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Apr 14, 2014 19:06
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Animal posted:So I finished reading The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, which puts me in a new class of geek. Anyways I want one of you milhis nerds to give me a concise summary on how Cromwell managed to build up an army that whooped rear end, and why this protestant culture was so much better at waging war than their royalist opposition. Most of the royalists were also Protestants (and the ones who weren't kept quiet about it); both sides were English, you know, it's not like they had a separate 'culture' in any real sense and it's also not like culture has much effect on martial proficiency (the Catholics were certainly making hay in the 30 Years War around the same time, after all). In fact both sides in the English Civil War were incompetent as gently caress by Continental standards, especially early on, which is not unusual in a civil war. As for why the New Model whooped rear end, outnumbering the royalists 2:1 by this stage of the war helped quite a bit, oddly enough.
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Apr 15, 2014 20:31
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Nenonen posted:Caesar's first invasion of Britain was opposed, and successful. Surely not the scale of Overlord, but it could be done. That's stretching the definition of 'invasion of Britain', surely. I mean, if you're counting that then you might as well count the St Nazaire raid too.
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Jun 7, 2014 19:39
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Sylphid posted:I imagine English armies landed in hostile French territory all the time during the Hundred Years' War. For most (all?) of that period, a fairly large chunk of northern France was English (well, Anglo-Norman, and let's not forget the 'Norman' part of that term refers to an area of modern-day France). So not really, no. Marched into it, sure.
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Jun 7, 2014 19:48
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HEY GAL posted:Check out the Putney Documents for more on that. And at least one of the Putney guys actually did have egalitarian beliefs. The Putney Debates and the Levellers are a pretty interesting bunch. The egalitarianism comes at least as much from the Bible as from modern political ideas of egality, though, and has a long historical precedent - 'When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?'; although the Agitators (being representatives elected by the ordinary soldiers of each regiment on those soldiers' own initiative) do sound intriguingly similar to the soldiers' Soviets of the Russian Revolution. (This is also the only period in English history when England was a Republic; these guys had an underrated influence on the American revolutionaries in the next century when they were coming up with their own ideology).
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Aug 1, 2014 19:56
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Arquinsiel posted:You'd be amazed how much it's used. I'd wager every program you're using right now (assuming an x86/x64 CISC Intel-style chip) is full of them. Uhhh. If you mean a branch at the machine code level, yes, every program you use does and it doesn't depend on the chip type. Bit hard to have useful programs without them. In source code, as opposed to while/if/other structured programming stuff (that do of course compile down to a conditional or unconditional branch in machine code) - not so much. Especially given all the programming languages out there that don't even have a goto. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Aug 15, 2014 |
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Aug 15, 2014 19:57
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Arquinsiel posted:I've played it. It holds up remarkably well when you substitute nerf guns for the cannon he used. You can still get those cannon as retro toys, in the UK at least; I had one as a kid and I'm not a centenarian.
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Sep 3, 2014 19:51
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EvanSchenck posted:I don't know offhand if Prussia held any of Mexico's foreign debt, but there was a German mercantile presence in Mexico City that is sometimes referred to as a "colony." That doesn't necessarily have any imperial connotations though, if that's what you're thinking; it's in the same sense as say 'artists' colony' (i.e. a bunch of dudes with something in common living in the same place).
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Sep 8, 2014 19:33
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Nckdictator posted:So, I have a few questions related to each other. Spanish Civil War, assuming you count gendarmes as police. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guardia_de_Asalto The war would have been over in a few weeks if it wasn't for them. Actually, I imagine most civil wars count given they start out as rebellions by citizens of a country against its government, which is sort of what the (riot) police are there to deal with.
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Sep 10, 2014 18:45
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Bacarruda posted:An open-ocean showdown between the IJN and the US Navy would have been a pretty even fight. Not necessarily, but being 50% outnumbered by Japanese carriers, outnumbered in literally everything else as well, and, as you mention, having non-functional torpedoes without knowing it...I don't see reasons to anticipate a happy fun time for the US fleet in that situation. It's not suicide but the odds are with the Japanese.
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Sep 16, 2014 19:29
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PittTheElder posted:By the by, is that post particularly accurate? It sounds on the level, I'd just like to have a second opinion that isn't 'some Usenet post', not that 'some SA post' is necessarily all that better. Sealion being impossible is a well-known alternate history community thing and has been for decades, so at least in essence it is, or at least no-one in 20 years has found a convincing way to prove otherwise. Definitely the Germans in 1940 had nothing like the logistics, naval strength, aerial dominance, manpower of the Allies by 1944 in Overlord and that was still touch and go in places.
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Sep 16, 2014 22:04
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Cyrano4747 posted:
To be fair, this one is an ocean liner not a warship. One advantage British carriers did have in the East was that they had armoured decks, which is quite handy for resilience against bombs and kamikazes (with the tradeoff that there's less space for planes, of course).
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Sep 17, 2014 19:30
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Pornographic Memory posted:I'm pretty sure Churchill just loved random naval/amphibious sideshow operations for their own sake. Churchill probably never saw a stretch of coastline he didn't want to land some soldiers on. To be fair, I see nothing in that wiki entry indicating he wanted to land any troops. Just a naval operation, which isn't necessarily that unreasonable; it's not like the Germans or the at-the-time-hostile Soviets had huge naval forces in the Baltic.
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Sep 27, 2014 10:48
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Cyrano4747 posted:It's a little hard to argue that anyone who was born in 1900 saw a better version of the world than someone who was born in 1850 as well. And, of course, if you happened to be black and American you get to be a human being in 1900 too!  Edit: actually, life was better in most of the industrialised world if you were born working class, too. The welfare state was a developing thing by 1918, child labour laws existed, etc, etc.
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Oct 2, 2014 20:03
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vuk83 posted:And you can bet your dollar's that the Chinese and ussr are researching ways to jam the gently caress out of drones. I'd be worried about spying/espionage. Imagine a scenario where your air force is all heavily armed drones and someone figures out how to p0wn them and control them themselves. You could get some literal Galactica poo poo going on.
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Oct 3, 2014 18:26
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bewbies posted:I'd say that's more of a triumph of industrial power and resource mobilization than technical ingenuity. Kind of a microcosm of the war, that. Uh. It needed industry and resources, sure, but the atom bomb didnt also require serious technical ingenuity? Really?
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Oct 30, 2014 21:53
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Trin Tragula posted:100 Years Ago Tiny point but, Apparently General Lomax didn't actually die til 1915?
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Oct 31, 2014 22:32
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Cyrano4747 posted:They're toasted! That can't be right, Don Draper invented that slogan in 1960 
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Nov 13, 2014 20:41
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tonberrytoby posted:There is a higher quality coffee wartime substitute (made from figs) that was advertised a lot by bio-stores a few years ago. It was supposed to be very healty and tasty if mixed with real coffee. I never got around to buying some. To be fair, I doubt fig trees grow in Germany...
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Nov 14, 2014 20:27
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Mustang posted:Always makes me wonder what the ancient Romans would think of their Italian descendants, at least the Spaniards had a respectable empire going on for a while only to have it kicked in the teeth in the end by another nation speaking a barbaric Germanic language Excuse me the British Empire would like a word. 
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Nov 16, 2014 18:50
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Tomn posted:Hey, Hegel, do you know anything about espionage during your era? Like how spies were recruited, how they were used, and if in fact there was anything like a formal position of spymaster and whatnot? Anything on the subject would be interesting! Not to speak for Hegel, but spymasters certainly existed, eg this chap - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Thurloe Half the point of having embassies and diplomats was to facilitate intelligence/spying, too, same as it is now.
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Dec 2, 2014 20:02
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P-Mack posted:I just picked up Team Yankee at a used book sale, so all of this NATO/ Soviet chat couldn't be better timed. Other interesting books in a similar vein: First Clash (canucks) Red Army (soviet perspective) Chieftains (ar boys  - in typically British fashion, it doesn't end well)
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Dec 2, 2014 21:40
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