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Maybe not the right thread to ask but now I'm wondering, has anybody ever cucked a king and had his boy take the throne without people realizing it until it was too late, Game of Thrones-style?
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Jul 7, 2014 05:01
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Smoking Crow posted:Not get encircled or die. From reading Ivan's War (just finished it  ) apparently becoming a partisan was also acceptable. Though, that might be just considered a variation on fighting to the death (which was obviously ok) and just not managing to die while fighting. Discarding your identity papers or anything of that nature was a big no-no, though, because then they'd just say you were a deserter or bandit or collaborator whenever the Red Army came back in town.
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Jul 10, 2014 15:23
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From what I remember when I was reading shell arguments in World of Tanks a long long time ago, basically high velocity guns (like the Panther's 75mm) will have less explosive power than lower velocity guns of a similar caliber (like the early Sherman's 75mm, or the Panzer IV's 75mm) because the shell needs a thicker casing to withstand the stronger forces acting on it, leaving less room for explosive filler even in High Explosive shells. Incidentally this also means that when the Sherman got upgunned from 75mm to 76mm, it actually lost effectiveness against infantry since the new gun required a new shell that could pack in less explosive filler. Somebody else can probably talk more about how a bigger shell relates to a smaller shell, though.
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Jul 11, 2014 15:33
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I'd think making military specializations for dwarves specifically would run into the problem of lack of dwarves. Plus then you run into the problem of what to do with the people with dwarfism in your military if that role becomes obsolete or they get promoted out of that specialty or...you get the picture. For a question of my own, you hear about Soviet PoW's being subject to "filtration" by the NKVD when they were liberated, but did anybody give Western Allied PoW's poo poo when they were liberated? Was there any official discrimination against them or stigma toward being a PoW?
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Jul 19, 2014 01:50
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:I found it amusing that when I read Beevor's book on Normandy, he basically skewered the British for going on with repeated futile attacks around Caen and portrayed Patton as one of the few sensible Allied generals. Which is pretty accurate, but Patton gets a bad rap. To be honest I felt like he had a sort of running anti-British bias throughout the book. I don't know, maybe it's true, and maybe as a Brit himself he just has easier access to research or knows more about British conduct for whatever reason so he's just being truthful and it just happens the Brits really were overcautious fuckups, but like when talking about the effectiveness of fighter-bombers he specifically calls out RAF Typhoon pilots for wildly over-claiming tank kills from their rockets. Which is true, but it's also a common pattern for air crews to overreport damage on ground targets across all nations and types of planes. He also let Monty have it with both barrels too if I remember right but that's a pretty common thing. Maybe "bias" is the wrong word, but he definitely was very critical of the Brits all around it seemed like whereas American forces and generals seemed to get a much more even handed treatment.
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Jul 28, 2014 21:06
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Arquinsiel posted:Found The Guns of August going cheap in a local bookshop today so I grabbed it. The thread has claimed another victim. Yeah well I read Ivan's War, Wages of Destruction (may actually be from the Nazi thread but still a good book relevant to this thread), am working on Shattered Sword, and gave my dad The Guns of August for Christmas but didn't get to it myself, all because of this thread. If I were a faster reader I'd be more hosed than a newly minted PC gamer during his first Steam sale.
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Aug 1, 2014 01:50
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gyrobot posted:So how effective would penal battalions be if you are trying to get rid of dissidents? Give them nothing but melee weapons and send them off to die Penal battalions weren't really a way of getting rid of dissidents, per se, so much as a way of attempting to get some sort of combat use out of political prisoners and criminals, who are people you probably would not want to seed the regular units of troops with. Obviously such people would not be missed if they were dead, but Germany and the USSR (despite the "Russian hordes" image) were both experiencing extreme manpower shortages during WWII which definitely was a motivating factor behind the idea of "let's give criminals and dissidents weapons" as opposed to merely imprisoning them. edit: or executing them Pornographic Memory fucked around with this message at 14:27 on Aug 1, 2014 |
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Aug 1, 2014 14:08
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I kind of love that Ensign Expendable's blog of translated Soviet military documents started so he could troll people on the World of Tanks forums by blindsiding them with citations from primary sources that they literally would have had no way of obtaining or reading before Ensign posted them.
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Aug 2, 2014 20:35
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Whenever a wedge formation for anything is used, is there any special way they pick the guy who's at the tip of the wedge? Because thinking about it, it would really suck to be that guy since you're the most obvious target and the most exposed.
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Aug 2, 2014 20:39
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Koramei posted:what if it shot the tree the cameraman is gonna have some bad splinters
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Aug 6, 2014 01:56
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Googling "Iwo Jima tank radio chatter" gave me this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtnNXYEqAD4 Not the same transmission from the transcript, though. Slavvy posted:Touching on this, were the more experienced units in WWII (or other wars, I suppose) given more ammunition for their tanks? Like, lets say a tank is nominally designed to carry 30 shells. If the combat life expectancy of the tank is measured in minutes, it doesn't make sense to load the thing up with the full thirty when it's only likely to fire a few before being destroyed itself. Was there a policy of deliberately under-loading the vehicles given to inexperienced units? I'm thinking particularly of the USSR because of the sheer number of tanks destroyed during Kursk and the like. I think the answer here is that no this most likely did not happen, because if it were a provably widespread practice it's the sort of thing that would probably be widely repeated since it plays so well into stereotypes of the Red Army. Plus there's the fact that this sort of thing flies in the face of logic, since it only actually saves shells if you calculate, correctly, that literally all your tanks are going to be irrecoverable losses in a time frame less than it would take for them to expend their ammo loads. Realistically not all your troops in any operation will be casualties, many of your casualties will be recoverable, tanks that are total losses may still be able to have their ammo (or other parts, for that matter) salvaged, and you cannot predict which of your men/tanks specifically are just going to be future total write-offs not worth a full ammo load. edit: obviously shell shortages did happen but if you had the shells it would be retarded to tell some units "nope you can only get this many until you prove you're good enough to have a full load" Pornographic Memory fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Aug 6, 2014 |
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Aug 6, 2014 18:47
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CoolCab posted:See, my read of it would be that the commander is joking. American's famously never were particularly choosy about their ammo consumption anyway, having the colossal materiel advantage. Ordering his men to literally run the enemy down sounds like a really quick way to get a bunch of grenades right under you going off. Supposedly a tactic used on the Eastern Front was for tanks to stop over foxholes and rotate in place to deal with the infantry in them. It sounds strange and risky but I'm pretty sure I read it in either Beevor's book on Berlin, Band of Brothers (describing it as something the Germans learned in the East maybe) or, most likely and least reliably, Guy Sajer's book The Forgotten Soldier. Then again I also read a first person account from The Reader's Digest's The World At Arms (man that book was awesome when I was first learning about WWII) was a German soldier describing actually manning a trench waiting for Russian tanks to deliberately run over them so they could plant magnetic grenades on their "bellies". The same book (Reader's Digest one) also mentioned that the Japanese improvised anti-tank mines in the Phillipines by having a guy sit in a hole with a hammer and an artillery shell or aircraft bomb 
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Aug 6, 2014 19:51
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OctaviusBeaver posted:I believe this happened to the Americans at the Kasserine Pass in North Africa. At least Wikipedia claims: Doing some googling on the subject, I found this from a random website on a tank unit in the Phillipines during 1942: http://www.proviso.k12.il.us/bataan%20web/Garrett_J.htm posted:tanks also would park with one track over foxhole and spin by applying power to one track It also pulled up a book on google books about an infantry man in a glider unit of the 101st who said German tanks would do it to them and it would grind the occupants to death if the ground was soft enough, and if the ground held racing the engines would fill the foxholes with exhaust. Ensign Expendable posted:Lieutenant [Azobkov] drove his tank over the trench where the surviving soldiers were hiding, and started thinking. How do you get them out of their hole in the ground? Lieutenant Azobkov came up with a creative solution. He opened the emergency hatch, hung out of it, and started shooting the Germans with his Nagant. Those that tried to escape were killed with the tank machinegun. Having killed the ten soldiers from the trench, the Lieutenant grabbed a box of German mines, some documents, closed the hatch, and continued the attack. I like how apparently there was almost nothing that was too crazy that some Russian guy wouldn't try it at least once if he thought it would kill some Germans. Pornographic Memory fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Aug 7, 2014 |
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Aug 7, 2014 04:58
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Plus I don't think you need to get the tread in that much deeper to grind on a dude with your tread.
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Aug 7, 2014 15:05
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PittTheElder posted:Which brings me to my next question: when a tank gets hit, what exactly is it that knocks it out, assuming the engine isn't hit? Shell fragments and spall cooking off your ammunition is an obvious risk, but if your rounds are wet racked or outside the crew compartment, how much danger is the crew in from overpressure or spalling? Is a significant amount of heart actually transferring into the crew compartment? Curious about both WW2 era tanks and modern ones, if people happen to know. Well spalling is literally bits of steel flaking off, so if you have interior spalling in a tank from a shell impact that's basically shrapnel being sent flying inside your crew compartment, so that would be a pretty big danger to the crew. There's lots of parts of a tank that could be damaged and not make it totally incapable of operating, but more or less ineffective for combat - the turret ring could be jammed, the gun itself could be damaged, the tracks and wheels could be disabled...and once any of those happen, most crews probably would not want to stick around in a combat situation, so either they pull the tank back, or maybe just outright bail. And don't forget that tanks also have fuel tanks, as well, which can start fires or even outright explode. I believe Ensign Expendable's blog actually had a post on the particular fuel levels inside a fuel tank that would create an optimal fuel/air mix for catastrophic explosions.
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Aug 17, 2014 23:57
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SlothfulCobra posted:That's probably a good counter to one of these guys. Now there's a dude who was probably really really happy that radar made him obsolete.
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Aug 20, 2014 14:38
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What was the deal with secret treaties in that era, anyway? I mean, I understand the British being hush-hush because of Parliament kicking up a fuss, but France was the only other major democracy involved in WWI, and I remember it being mentioned in The Guns of August that the terms of their treaty with Russia were actually secret too. I can't imagine French public opinion being too upset since it was clearly targeted at the Germans, and they can't have been the only practitioners of this, so what's the reason for this? It makes me think of the whole Dr. Strangelove thing where your deterrent isn't really a deterrent if the enemy doesn't know you have it. Was it basically just that everybody was intentionally courting war with the expectation that they would win?
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Aug 23, 2014 00:05
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Germany already held French territory before the war even started, in their minds - Alsace and Lorraine. If France left Russia out to dry then they'd be pretty much writing off getting it back forever, because who else could they ally with to defeat Germany? Also if Germany had just gone right across the border without going into Belgium they'd be throwing themselves head on into the bulk of the French army and their fortified zone on the border.
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Aug 23, 2014 05:47
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Considering that at the time I remember the US's actions with regard to the UN, in the lead up to the Iraq War, basically consisted of the two-pronged approach of lying its rear end off to try and get the UN to lend legitimacy to the invasion, and flipping them the bird when they didn't buy it, a strategy revolving around having a UN mission coming in to clean up our mess could politely be described as wishful thinking. Probably the only chance of it happening would depend on the UN weapons inspectors finding weapons of mass destruction but that didn't happen and I think you'd have a hard time convincing many countries to contribute troops to such a mission even if it did.
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Aug 23, 2014 17:11
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Kind of a vague question, but how decentralized was the German Empire, and how did it affect military matters? Was it just a matter of having units in an otherwise uniform military recruited on a regional basis, or was there real differences in how, say, a Prussian unit would be organized and equipped compared to a Bavarian one?
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Sep 15, 2014 06:09
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Yeah, Shattered Sword talks about how after their initial conquest spree, the Japanese are trying to decide where to next - cut off Australia? Midway? The Aleutians? Invade Australia directly? Since the Army only grudgingly gave up troops for the project to conquer the Philippines, Malayasia, Indonesia, etc in the first place, after conquering all of that they basically vetoed any further offensives that would require them to commit troops because this whole Pacific War thing is the Navy's baby, so if the Navy wants to conquer some Pacific real estate for more naval bases they need to provide their own landing troops. Oh, yeah, and the Navy did indeed have its own ground troops. And both services operated a land-based air arm with their own models of bombers and fighters. I'm pretty sure the Army operated its own transport ships too.
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Sep 17, 2014 20:57
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JaucheCharly posted:Can't be. What would you do with 100 tons of empty wool sacks? Oo Sandbags?
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Sep 22, 2014 22:35
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Reading the Guns of August makes me want to reach through history and strangle Sir John French. Even when set beside Kaiser Wilhelm, Joffre, and 90% of the Russian leaders and commanders, he really stands out head and shoulders to me as the biggest jackass of them all. Granted he's acting on a somewhat smaller scale than they are, with just the BEF as opposed to bigger armies and entire nations, but he's just so moody that it seems like they just gave an army to a whiny brat. You can really sense how everybody around him is utterly exasperated with him, but since nobody's in a position to just sack him they have to beg and plead with him to do anything at all as delicately as possible.
Pornographic Memory fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Sep 25, 2014 |
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Sep 25, 2014 00:48
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Due to a failure of design, Austrian saddles were worthless and thus the Austrian cavalry was worthless. WHAT  How does a military adopt a saddle that doesn't work? It seems like it would be a pretty well understood technology for, well, a very very long time before that point.
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Sep 25, 2014 21:34
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gradenko_2000 posted:What was it like being classmates with Winston Churchill? 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.
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Sep 26, 2014 19:47
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The US actually did land troops in China to oversee the surrender of Japanese troops there and turn over the territory, plus significant amounts of supplies, to the Nationalists when they left IIRC.
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Oct 4, 2014 22:49
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He doesn't look very happy standing around in possibly the world's biggest basket.
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Oct 11, 2014 00:34
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Sounds pretty ridiculous and all but on the other hand maybe you've heard of this guy who basically did that for real.
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Oct 18, 2014 16:48
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So I was reading on wikipedia about the Russian Civil War and what's the deal with these hats? Were they specific to the Reds? Where does the style come from? Did they realize it looked stupid as heck?
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Oct 19, 2014 23:57
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With all the hosed up poo poo and dead bodies in there I still laughed at this picture. Like the guy on the left is trying to awkwardly explain how his gun is so much nicer and more modern looking to the other guy who's jealous since him and everybody else just has dinky AKs. I know AUGs have been around for a while but still.
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Oct 30, 2014 16:52
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Underclaiming casualties means that you hopefully get food and supplies (and, in an earlier era, maybe even more modern ones too, money) for all the men you say you have, so the men you actually have can get a bigger share. If I'm remembering right, in the Soviet system, units only received replacements when they were withdrawn from the line to rest and refit, rather than having replacements trickled in more or less continuously like the US military did during WWII. With such a scheme for replacements, it makes perfect sense to leave dead men on the muster rolls while on the line because to report them is just telling HQ you have less mouths to feed, not "send us more men".
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Nov 1, 2014 00:18
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Bacarruda posted:Fury 2 will be Russian Brad Pitt raping and pillaging his way through Berlin in a T-34 with a ragtag crew of Kazakhs, Siberians, Georgians, and a Ukrainian guy who really doesn't want to be there. But it's okay because deep down he's really a decent guy who's just hurt by all the awful stuff he's seen and done, which he shows by sneaking off to the side and making constipated faces while smoking.
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Nov 4, 2014 01:52
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Saint Celestine posted:Didn't they make a Fallujah game? I wouldn't be surprised. They made a game based on the PMC Blackwater (now known as Academi), who were intimately involved in the Iraq War and whose contractors being murdered precipitated that battle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_%28video_game%29
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Nov 13, 2014 20:10
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JcDent posted:I had a few questions, sorry is some of them might prove inflamatory in nature For this one it's pretty much that a large, modern, centralized nation with a population willing to, or effectively coerced into, fighting to the bitter end is incredibly hard to subdue due to the amount of people and resources it can mobilize for war. Add on to that the fact that Germany's occupied territories gave it a lot of space that it could both drain more resources from, and retreat into, and that drags things out even longer.
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Nov 19, 2014 05:27
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My maternal grandfather was an infantryman in the US 3rd Infantry Division and fought at Anzio and beyond. Apparently he operated a bazooka and was wounded multiple times, but unfortunately he died before I was 10 so I couldn't really get or properly appreciate any war stories he could tell - he did tell me one or two though and seemed to be proud of his time in the war, so it kind of sucks that he didn't live to be older since I'm sure he had some good ones. My paternal grandfather died right after I was born, but I heard he never told my dad or his brothers about his time in the service except that he was in the air force in the Pacific. I don't know much about him in general except that he was apparently a very intense and private person, so I can only really guess he was ashamed of it or was traumatized by it, or maybe it was perfectly normal and he just didn't like to talk about it.
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Dec 22, 2014 05:05
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Disinterested posted:Anyone with a u-boating grandfather? One of my best friends growing up had a grandpa who was a sailor on a u-boat. It made it an especially type moment when I saw u-boat crew casualty statistics for the first time.
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Dec 22, 2014 17:18
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BurningStone posted:Ironically, often paratroopers get considered too valuable to lose doing their main purpose, and instead get used as elite regular infantry. I think Crete soured a lot of countries on actually making drops. Yeah, airborne drops ended up being really limited because simply dropping an airborne unit into an area behind enemy lines relying on them to take and hold territory on their own was basically suicide, so it had to be one element of a big huge undertaking where you have to have heavier conventional forces moving in quickly to come to their aid. No matter how highly trained they are, it's hard to make up for the disadvantages of having virtually no heavy weaponry and having to have your supplies air dropped in. Crete and Market Garden were bloodbaths that show what happens when paratroopers are dropped into places where they have to win the battle on their own against conventional forces (Crete) or the cavalry doesn't show up (Market Garden).
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Jan 23, 2015 04:39
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Animal posted:You mean a VTOL jet dropship? It would be the most fuel inefficient thing ever created for no benefit. Turboprops are perfect for the task, the are jet engines with a shaft and a prop. Maybe we could scale that back to a jet that can take off and land vertically, from the same ampihibious assault ships the Ospreys do.
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Jan 24, 2015 02:03
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Hogge Wild posted:War weariness is a real thing, but you're overestimating the effectiveness of the Soviet propaganda. Eg. Finnish soldiers were allowed to collect it, because it was thought to be so harmless. I think what is meant is less propaganda from the Soviets about overthrowing your capitalist exploiters or whatever, but rather Allied propaganda about the Soviets, like this well-known one:  I guess they could make a snazzy card of a guy with a Waffen-SS uniform with that caption to gin up some love for their war against the Soviets but the Western Allies didn't exactly pretend the Russians were just some guys on the other side of the continent who were coincidentally fighting that Hitler guy too.
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Jan 26, 2015 23:04
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Almost undoubtedly, someone on each side seriously considered this. If Churchill didn't come up with it himself at some point I'm sure he'd be all over that poo poo if somebody suggested it to him.
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Feb 4, 2015 18:27
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