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Ensign Expendable posted:The young officers that rose up to replace the purged ones were lacking experience, and lacking the initiative for improvisation, choosing to stick to manuals (which obviously couldn't cover everything). Was it Soviet doctrine that caused a lack of improvisation, or inexperience and fear of failure? Pop culture has this picture of Soviets as rigidly following doctrine while the Americans cherished innovation.
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Feb 4, 2014 01:17
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Nenonen posted:You have to source a claim like that, otherwise I find it hard to agree. Your average Gorky family is not going to have many relatives in Pskov, and those that do are going to be unaware of what goes on behind the frontlines. Yeah, while it's true now that most people know friends and relatives from all over their country, this was not so true in 1941. Back then it was hard to move a long way, especially across the Soviet Union, and not many people had a reason to do so.
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Feb 8, 2014 21:30
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It's come up for me as well, so I make an effort to find the sources and read them myself if I'm going to want to cite this thread.
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Feb 9, 2014 11:01
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Squalid posted:One theory for this asymmetrical colonization is that the Neartic fauna were the product of a larger, more competitive, evolutionary system, including North America, Eurasia, and North Africa. Larger populations generally produce a larger number of genetic mutations than equivalent smaller populations. If that is the case, can we expect a similar difference in the production of cultural innovations, assuming they propagate in a darwinian fashion, between large and small human populations? This idea's been around for a while. I think Jared Diamond touched on it in Guns, Germs, and Steel, maybe I'm thinking of a different author, but we definitely covered the concept in an anthropology class. The basic idea is clear - places with more opportunities for innovation have more innovation. A lot of "European" technology built off of things that gradually propagated over from China. A lot of Mesoamerican technology was dismissed as useless and went to waste after the Spanish conquest. Another idea relates to the function of ritualized warfare and how you're going to see killing technology develop very different based on whether the goal is to kill the enemy or capture prisoners for ransom or sacrifice.
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Feb 16, 2014 03:41
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Saint Celestine posted:How do you fly a satellite? Launches are the tricky part, after that it's a matter of using fuel occasionally to stop the orbit from decaying.
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Feb 16, 2014 20:49
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steinrokkan posted:The Thirty Year War which started over disputed legality of the destruction of two churches in small Bohemian towns, and ended as a major factor in shaping European politics of the entire modern era. While technically correct, isn't that like saying the American Civil War started over the shelling of Fort Sumter? I'm under the impression that the religious conflict was already causing unrest across Europe and the Bohemian Revolt happened to be the event that drew a lot of powers into war.
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Feb 26, 2014 22:15
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Sidesaddle Cavalry posted:Then steam power and armor got really good at the same time and some tacticians wondered if ramming was cool! How long did ramming remain a viable tactic? War of the Worlds has a chapter where a naval ram destroys three Martian tripods, and I figure it was in popular culture, if not reality, the most powerful weapon on Earth.
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Feb 27, 2014 22:47
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ArchangeI posted:We need to go back to the medieval practice that both side agree after a battle what the name of the battle is. Only, you know, for wars. Was there actually an organized way to do that? I know the American Civil War used different naming conventions, so you have things like the Battle of Bull Run/Battle of Manassas.
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Feb 28, 2014 17:58
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PittTheElder posted:"At times" is something of an understatement. A lot of recent examination of the war is showing just how often truces were in effect, and how even though both sides were still shooting at each other to appease HQ, they were deliberately missing. Are there any recent books on the subject? I love reading about the Christmas Truce and similar things.
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Mar 9, 2014 00:15
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Excuse me, how can you overlook the conclusive evidence posted on this very website?Triticum Guzzler posted:Ah, Prospector. My dearest old friend. I am still alive and quite well, thank you. Have not seen these chem trails of which you speak, as I am residing in a remote location south of ______________. But, there is a Starbucks so no complaints lol -- just a little lonely -- but as they say, leaders don't have friends. Such a shame that I became so hated by the modern world, people whose generation I had no affect on. Though your government is very good at what it does, and that is spreading lies and propaganda. There was no holocaust -- those body stash pictures were just captured prisoners and war criminals. A certain... Alphabet soup agency just wanted my country's insanely sick black technology for their own. That new iPhone? It's rubbish. Don't get me started on Play Station. I had a better console in my underground lair over half a century ago until Force Recon stormed my bunker and I had to haul rear end. You should know I still look the same, if not younger... my heart still kicks like a drum,. You would not believe the advances we had in age reversal even in the 40s, and were going to give it to my Aryan kingdom, until your suits snatched it away from me so they could profit off engineered sickness and "natural causes." It's good to hear from you, as always, and I wish you and the FYAD gang all the best. I am very intriqued by this irony that you guys use a lot. Stop by __________ some time, and I might just take you for a ride in my old Vril disk anti grav space ship. Truly yours,
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Mar 15, 2014 10:59
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PittTheElder posted:I'm pretty sure most Afghanis don't (or didn't, they probably do now) know what even 9/11 was. You're talking about a very rural country, that had been in a civil war for 30 years, had been bombed to poo poo multiple times, and the better part of which was ruled by people that outlawed all foreign media. Yep. Here's an article from a few years back on the subject. The Wall Street Journal posted:Mr. Ghattar stared blankly when asked whether he knew about al Qaeda's strike on the U.S., launched a decade ago from Afghan soil.
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Mar 17, 2014 05:05
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How much pressure did Soviet doctrine put on Nazi logistics? I imagine that constantly fighting can't be good for feeding the men or repairing the tanks, but I've never heard of non-partisan Soviet attempts to sneak around the German front line and go after supply lines.
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Mar 21, 2014 00:00
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sullat posted:War bonds also eventually get paid back. I dunno if little Timmy ever got back his 100 rubles he sent in for the tank. Only if the issuer can pay it, so the war bond is partially a gauge of how much investors expect the issuing country to win the war. Of course the middle of a war is not exactly the best time for a sober assessment of one's homeland's chance of victory.
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Mar 21, 2014 08:15
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WEEDLORDBONERHEGEL posted:I really want to know if the Lakota picked ghost shirts up from German immigrants. It's 19th century, right? There's tons of German-Americans by that point. Crazy Horse's cousin Kicking Bear is the one who introduced the idea of ghost shirts protecting wearers from harm, and he probably got inspiration from the Mormons living in Nevada, where the Ghost Dance movement got started. The Ghost Dance movement is an interesting time in American history and I wish I knew enough to do it justice. Basically, it was a major Native American religious revival beginning around 1890, with support from the Mormons who believed Native Americans were privy to special Christian religious teachings. There was a lot of tension because of the U.S. government breaking treaty terms and trying to relocate the Sioux to arid farmland, which led to calls for violent resistance against the whites. The government sent in the military out of fear of an armed uprising, and they went around disarming chiefs known to support the movement. At Wounded Knee the disarmament got violent and the army killed over 100 civilians, which terrified the population and effectively ended the Ghost Dance movement. The Sioux leveraged popular outrage to force the government to acknowledge their treaty rights, so it amounted to a lot of running just to stay in the same place. 20 soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor for their roles in the battle of Wounded Knee and subsequent massacre. There have been calls for the revocations of these medals, but a Medal of Honor hasn't been taken away in nearly a century and there doesn't seem to be the political will to do it now.
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Apr 1, 2014 07:10
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BurningStone posted:As was pointed out before, WWII is unusual in that nobody was willing to negotiate anything. Germany and Japan both fought on long after they had a hope of winning. Russia and the UK both had low points where they could have thought about going peace out. When you compare with the first World War, Russia signs a separate peace in 1917 and Germany surrendered while their armies were still in France. Considering what happened to Russia and Germany afterwards, it's understandable that countries would fight to the end. By 1941 everyone was aware that whoever won the war would have power to shape the world as they saw fit.
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Apr 6, 2014 16:55
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StashAugustine posted:I was naming all my Spartan cities in Alpha Centurai after famous battles, and I realized I didn't really know much about the military history of non-European countries. If I lived in China or India or Latin America or so on, what would my Normandy and Waterloo and Agincourt be? I'm curious about this question too. For Russia the answer might be Kharkov, Borodino, and the Battle On The Ice. Every culture has a famous battle that marks the first big counterattack in a long war, the downfall of a feared enemy, and a decisive victory against overwhelming odds. Surely non-Europeans have versions of all these that get used in rhetoric as much as English speakers use D-Day and Waterloo as idioms.
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Apr 14, 2014 07:57
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SeanBeansShako posted:Just reading about Napoleon's 1812 Invasion into Russian. Those poor horses and dumb teenage recruits jesus. And we've only just begun. The Memoirs of Sergeant Bourgogne is an amazing first-person account of the invasion and retreat. If you're a fast reader with lots of spare time, I recommend War and Peace as well. gradenko_2000 posted:His abnormally huge left leg made up for his short arms What's the joke? Is there a famous ill-proportioned painting of Napoleon? the JJ posted:I'm blanking South and South-East Asia. Dien Bien Phu.
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Apr 15, 2014 21:13
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Now I want to see Gandhi riding a nuke like Slim Pickens.
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Apr 17, 2014 00:48
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Arquinsiel posted:I kind of want to try work out what all that'd be in modern terms now, given how recently we stopped using those. Translating costs over the centuries doesn't tend to work out very sensibly. You can see that a musket is roughly 1/10th of a labourer's annual pay, so you might ballpark it at £1300, but obviously that money can buy a much wider variety of useful things now than it could 400 years ago.
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May 8, 2014 22:11
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bewbies posted:Unsurprisingly they suffered a disproportionately high casualty rate, especially for the CSA where they were really, really easy to pick out...they were often the only ones from a regiment with a proper uniform. Does anyone have more information on CSA uniforms? I think they're fascinating but I don't know much about them. I understand it was common for the South to take Union uniforms and leave them in the sun to turn them grey, because they didn't have much of a textile industry to make new cloth.
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May 15, 2014 21:30
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HEY GAL posted:For the rest of this week, I've been reading about guys getting into vicious legal wrangles (or quasi-legal: they've been registering complaints against one another with the head of state but I don't think they're suing one another). The common soldiers get drunk and stab each other, the officers ruin their finances spending months cultivating obsessive hatreds. The part where they're supposed to be, you know, fighting wars seems to have escaped them. Also, a dude got punched in the face. I love your slice-of-life accounts from history, please post any interesting ones that you find. dublish posted:What, nobody's going to mention JEB Stuart, AP Hill or Thomas "We only lost the war because this guy died, SERIOUSLY" Jackson? Thomas Jackson? I had to look up Stonewall Jackson's first name to make sure it's the same guy. Since he was known as such an aggressive commander, is it possible the unknown Confederate who shouted to open fire after Jackson identified himself was trying to end his dangerous campaigning?
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May 16, 2014 15:37
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Fangz posted:Who was the last major head of state to voluntarily involve himself in fighting in a battle? Maybe Józef Piłsudski in 1920 at the Battle of Warsaw; I don't think he was at the front lines but he was certainly commanding the army while head of state. Of course that depends on if Poland counts as "major"; among great powers the last was probably Napoleon III in 1870 at the Battle of Sedan.
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May 16, 2014 16:41
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HEY GAL posted:I had to learn Degrees Reaumur my freshman year of undergraduate, since Lavoisier used it. Pain in the rear end. Are you American? The Celsius to Reaumur conversion is very simple, but converting from Fahrenheit to anything is much less intuitive. INTJ Mastermind posted:Simple fact is ISLANDS. DO. NOT. SINK. This reminds me of a story about the pirate Baptiste; he deliberately beached his ship during a battle with an English ship that had been sent to capture or kill him. Because the Bonne was aground, it sustained heavy damage but managed to sink the English ship. He then repaired his flagship and got it back to a safe port. Baptiste later tried the same plan against an English warship, and its cannon were tearing apart the Bonne so badly that he had to abandon ship and walk back to Acadia.
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May 20, 2014 09:05
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Libluini posted:On the contrary, I remember fondly destroying tanks with catapults and spear-men in Civilization. So life is exactly like a game of Civilization, is what you're claiming here. I like to think that veteran spearmen can defeat newly recruited tanks with molotov cocktails.
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May 23, 2014 10:43
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What kind of training went into ammunition management, both for artillery and infantry? Were there major battles decided because one side ran out of ammunition before the other? Did soldiers leave the lines briefly to resupply, or did they usually carry enough powder and shot to fight battles?
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Jun 5, 2014 15:24
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My stepfather used to fire the cannons at Louisbourg Fortress (as a reenactor, he's not that old) and he said that after they forged a new one they were always concerned that the cannon might explode on the first shot. Obviously it helped that they weren't actually shooting a ball and using less powder than a full charge, but was this a common problem? Did a ruptured cannon typically kill the firing crew?
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Jun 5, 2014 17:43
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HEY GAL posted:Also, the proofing shot should have been done at the foundry. That's been standard practice since the middle ages. Maybe it was and the cannonneers at Louisbourg didn't know that. They didn't and still don't have anything you'd call extensive guild-like training. My stepdad was a baker and one day they told him "w'ill thair, by, we need 'oon to fair tha' cannon todee" because one of the cannon guys quit suddenly, so he got a crash course. I loved the stuff you wrote earlier about how early on, soldiers saw the cannoneers as something a bit like wizards.
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Jun 5, 2014 18:12
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Pharmaskittle posted:I'm just a history amateur (if even that) and lurker on this thread and I know you guys don't like to get into alternate history too deeply, but would the Soviets have a shot at winning WW2 if the US had never entered the war? I mean, say they keep helping in a proxy way, but not going all in with troops. Back up a few pages, we were just arguing about this. The answer is yes, but more people would have died and the Soviets would control almost all of Europe.
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Jun 10, 2014 02:50
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Comstar posted:I think if the aerial bombardment had included chemical and biological weapons, it would have been much much worse. The Anathrax alone by the British would have killed everything in Europe. I'm morbidly interested in eschatology, and I remember a grim post describing the 1930s' vision of the end: Massive fleets of bombers releasing poison gas onto every major city in the world. The fact that no one in WWII used chemical weapons on another power with chemical weapons was a sort of pre-nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction.
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Jun 10, 2014 04:52
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FAUXTON posted:Da, is good train. Am-yerikan train. Depends what you mean by "avoided". If we wave a magic friendship wand so Truman and Stalin become best buddies, sure. The problem with hypotheticals like that is the huge number of political and economic factors that drove World War II to its particular outcome, and if you change those factors you have a completely different world. Most theories of international relations say that a clash between a massive democratic capitalist government and a massive autocratic communist government was historically inevitable, and everyone involved knew this. There was some hope for peace and good relations between the West and East, but events like the Berlin Blockade and Korean War quickly made that hope untenable.
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Jun 10, 2014 05:03
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Bacarruda posted:Given how rabidly anti-Soviet Truman was (and not without good reason), I'm not sure he was ever going to be best buddies with Stalin. That's why I used the words "magic friendship wand" to describe the likelihood of those two becoming buds. KildarX posted:What's the closest that the cold war came to a full on land war between NATO and the USSR? During the Berlin Crisis of 1961, there were NATO and USSR tanks staring each other down across the border. One itchy trigger finger could have triggered a major battle, so Khrushchev and Kennedy sensibly agreed to withdraw. The very next year, the Cold War came its closest to a nuclear exchange during the Cuban Missile Crisis. An American ship tried to force a Soviet submarine to the surface by dropping practice depth charges. The captain and political officer were unable to contact Moscow, and fearing a war had already broken out, wanted to launch a nuclear torpedo at the American fleet. The second-in-command, Vasily Arkhipov, convinced them to surface instead and head home.
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Jun 10, 2014 18:09
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HEY GAL posted:That dude is probably set for life, I doubt that even a 17th century mercenary could figure out a way to burn through that much money (they were not good with money). What did they have to spend it on? Pretty much hookers and liquors?
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Jun 11, 2014 18:15
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cheerfullydrab posted:You won't regret it! Have you read any of the 1632 series? I haven't but they sound atrocious. I read the first one. I'd rank it far above Turtledove, at least.
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Jun 11, 2014 23:43
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cheerfullydrab posted:As someone who has read almost every book Turtledove has written and is not proud of it, reeeeally? Definitely, and how are you not insane? The first time I read a Turtledove book I was thinking "decent plot but this guy's writing style is really repetitive." I read a bunch more and it got unbelievably repetitive. Being in a remote cabin with a hurt leg and a stack of Turtledove books made for one lousy summer.
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Jun 12, 2014 00:32
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I got started on alternate history and now I prefer reading historical fiction, particularly if it's well-researched. Old historical fiction like A Tale of Two Cities is cool because you can see the author's political views influencing the texts and that itself is a piece of history.
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Jun 12, 2014 05:37
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Grand Prize Winner posted:I thought desant tactics were used only at direst need, though, like if you didn't have enough trucks/jeeps/hmmvs/ifvs/whatevers to carry your dudes. It can be disastrous if the enemy is close enough to start shooting at the tanks, but behind the front lines it's a break from walking. There was a great story posted in GiP about a unit that was given sheep to give Iraqi farmers to build goodwill, but they didn't have any trucks to transport the sheep. They wound up strapping the sheep to a tank and driving them over to the village.
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Jun 14, 2014 07:32
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Tomn posted:I'm pretty sure the original source of the "amazingly heavy armor" myths came from people looking at show armor (not designed for actual use) or tournament armor (specifically focused on hyperprotection at the expense of mobility) and assuming that they were standard battle armor. I wouldn't be surprised if the myth specifically began to develop during the Enlightenment or Victorian eras, when people were big on congratulating themselves over how much smarter they were than medieval dimwits. This also led indirectly to the idea that the katana is vastly superior to any European sword. Because firearms were introduced to Japan rather than innovated, swords were seen as a symbol of Japan's glorious military tradition while Western pop culture viewed swords as unwieldy relics. World War II and the subsequent occupation showed American soldiers how a sword is still a sharp deadly weapon, and the idea spread around that Japanese swords specifically were better than anything produced in Europe.
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Jul 1, 2014 01:08
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the JJ posted:Cavalry et. al. were still in service for quite a while. I don't think the idea that 'steel sharp cutty ow' had quite disappeared from memory that quickly. People who knew more than nothing about the military understood that, but the pop culture had an idea that medieval swords all weighed 20 pounds and were more useful as bludgeons than as blades. Hypha posted:I always thought the fascination with oriental martial traditions was due to an extension of orientalism, coupled with losses in European martial traditions. Right, that's what I'm saying. With a special emphasis on Japan because of their extensive use of the martial tradition in World War II propaganda and the occupation.
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Jul 1, 2014 02:06
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ArchangeI posted:Depends on the time period, I guess. I would be surprised if there was never a case anywhere in the world where an obviously unskilled ruler was put aside for or by a more skilled sibling. But the thing is that monarchy is founded on tradition and legitimacy, and any loving around with the laws of succession is a major problem with that. At some point you have to explain why this guy (or gal) is allowed to rule the country. It's easy when that guy commands the biggest loving army in the realm, because if you don't do what he says he comes and fucks your poo poo up. But you can't run a country on the basis forever. At some point you have to have people follow your orders without having to put a soldier next to them. Being able to point to ten generations of rulers handing over the realm to their firstborn sons does that quite well ("We always did it that way"), even if the first of them achieved his exalted position by having the biggest loving army in the realm. That's a major obstacle to just saying "Actually my firstborn is kinda dumb, guess my second born will inherit, no big deal right?" The French tried to dick around with the rules of succession because the rightful heir to the throne was English, and they wanted to choose a French heir. This directly led to the Hundred Years' War, which nicely illustrates your point about the problem with changing the line of succession.
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Jul 6, 2014 20:35
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Torpor posted:Also is there a unit of measure that could be used as a measure of purchasing power over time? Like the Big Mac index, but throughout history. I've looked into this a bit, and it's hard to quantify anything as a measure of purchasing power. When dealing with economies that are too different to put a dollar value on everything, the best unit I've seen is hours of skilled labour. So in the above link we see that a carpenter, shipwright, or blacksmith would all be paid 50 denarii communes a day. The measures are all rather unfamiliar, but I can translate them to say that a pound of beef would cost about 1/5 of a day's wage, while chicken was a delicacy at 8 times that price.
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Jul 7, 2014 20:34
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