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Nenonen posted:What's the oldest known shield like? (not counting your own bones) The answer isn't entirely straightforward because the first shields were almost certainly made of materials like hide, leather, or wicker, which are apt to disintegrate over time. Based on primary sources from the ancient and classical period, like art or guys like Herodotus, we know that hide and wicker shields were used. There are also examples from recent times of indigenous peoples in the Americas and Africa using shields made from these kinds of perishable materials. The "oldest known shield" is probably from the depictions of soldiers in Egyptian wall art, which seems to have been a large rectangular shield made from oxhide stretched over a wooden frame.
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Nov 14, 2013 00:21
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Ron Jeremy posted:Why were the Germans wasting their energy crushing the uprising when the Red loving army was just over yonder? You'd think they'd be trying to get the gently caress away. Warsaw is a major regional transportation hub as well as a primary crossing of the Vistula River. It was also a relatively dense urban center that theoretically could be used as a defensive position to stall Soviet operations. Abandoning Warsaw would have meant conceding those advantages to the Soviets and probably made the whole front indefensible. Warsaw is also somewhat nearby East Prussia, at the time an actual part of Germany proper and populated by a bunch of actual Germans, and taking Warsaw eased the way towards Königsberg. Additionally, the Soviet summer offensive had petered out and their preparations for the fall were for a thrust southward against Romania, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, so there wasn't a compelling reason to run from Warsaw just then. Hitler also really wanted to kill all the Poles for daring to rise against him, and punish them by systematically destroying Warsaw. Just to be a giant rear end in a top hat, really. He also had some lunatic ideas about Warsaw serving as a fortress city to stop the Soviet's cold before they could get close to Germany. In practice when the Vistula-Oder Offensive finally commenced the Germans in Warsaw did pretty much what you suggested, and Hitler was super pissed and fired some generals for failing to resist Soviet forces that probably had 10 times the combat power of their played-out and pathetically understrength formations.
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Nov 18, 2013 08:52
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The German armies around Leningrad had some of their strength diverted to more important objectives around Moscow and further south in Ukraine, so they didn't really have the staying power for a protracted fight in urban terrain. This was especially the case because the Finns were obviously disinterested to participate and the Soviet defenders could have concentrated their efforts against the Germans to their south. Eventually Soviet force concentrations east of the city, such as the Volkhov front, became sufficiently threatening that the German army was overextended. They couldn't commit to an all-out attack on Leningrad itself without exposing themselves to a counteroffensive in the east. In fact I believe they were going to make an attempt to assault Leningrad in the summer of '42 but had to call it off because the Soviets simultaneously launched a concerted attempt to relieve the city. On the other hand, because of Leningrad's location on the Karelian isthmus it didn't require a huge commitment to isolate the city from the rest of the USSR. Operations around Leningrad don't seem to have had much effect on what was going in the rest of the theater. In additional, the Nazis' long-term plan for Leningrad was actually to destroy the city and exterminate the population, so it might even have been an inconvenience to take the city as it would have obliged the German army to deal with the population rather than simply starving them out in a siege.
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Nov 19, 2013 03:39
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Flesnolk posted:Götz von Berlichingen's page mentioned a large-scale peasant revolt he fought in, and it had me wondering. Medieval-ish fiction and fantasy portrays such revolts a lot, but were mass, armed uprisings of the peasantry ever really much of a thing in those days? Yes. Late medieval Europe from the 14th through the 16th centuries experienced an unusually high level of popular unrest relative to other periods. This included a large number of violent uprisings by the lower classes throughout the period. I believe the revolt that Götz von Berlichingen participated in, the German Peasants' War, is supposed to be the largest and most serious of these struggles. The explanation I've usually seen is that conditions had been improving steadily in much of Europe from the 11th through the 13th centuries, but then the continent had an extremely bad 14th century that reversed all the gains and then some. Famines, plagues, and widespread warfare disrupted the economy and lowered quality of life while simultaneously weakening political and religious authorities, who in many cases responded by increasing rather than easing pressure on the lower classes. Hence the civil unrest. Somebody else might have a more detailed understanding, though.
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Dec 5, 2013 23:38
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Hogge Wild posted:Was it Turtledove that had a book about South African whites conquering whole Africa with their Spartan like society? No, that was S.M. Stirling.
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Dec 7, 2013 01:30
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Slavvy posted:I guess I just can't picture how they would be useful in a direct combat role. They seem like something you could only ever use if you had really flat terrain to fight on and a really large battlefield (like the middle east). I can't understand how they were useful in Europe and other places because it seems like if there's some rocks in the paddock, or a river, or some trees or something they become pretty much worthless. I don't know anything about chariots which is really why I'm asking. One thing you should remember is that at that historically it was actually pretty difficult to make a battle happen unless both sides opted in. If an enemy army approached you looking to fight, and you didn't want to, it was very possible to just refuse battle and move away. I think the most famous use of this was the Fabian Strategy used by Rome during Hannibal's invasion of Italy. The Roman general Fabius Maximus refused to commit his armies to pitched battle, and instead he just followed Hannibal's army around. If Hannibal moved away from a source of supply, they scooted up to cut him off from it. If he sent out foraging parties, Fabius raided them. If Hannibal tried to force a field battle, Fabius just said "nope" and retreated into the nearest rough terrain, where Hannibal's army was at a disadvantage against the Roman infantry. This actually worked pretty well but was very politically unpopular. There are also other cases where armies sat around looking at each other across short distances for several days deciding whether or not to attack. The Battle of Marathon is an example of that. So unless the enemy army was cutting you off from something, like your water supply, or was threatening to grab something important like a city you really wanted to keep, it was actually possible to just decline to fight. The enemy wants to fight in a stony field where you can't use chariots? Just decline to fight, and then tomorrow maybe you can offer battle in a better spot. Anyway, the tactical utility of a chariot is that under the right conditions it's highly mobile and provides a stable platform for the use of ranged weapons like javelins and bows. You have two guys, one to drive and one to shoot, so your chariots can just wheel around back and forth in front of enemy infantry chewing them up, and the infantry will never catch them. The use of chariots in battle eventually declined because more effective cavalry began appearing on the battlefield, who were fast enough to catch the chariots and much more agile and effective in close-in fighting.
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Dec 16, 2013 01:28
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I think some people were talking up the thread about Dan Carlin doing a Hardcore History series about WWI, I was wondering if anybody has listened to the whole first episode. I listened to it for about half an hour and I thought it was sort of ok but he kept mentioning the JFK assassination in a way that implied he didn't think Oswald acted alone, and then the third time he cited Niall Ferguson it got to be too much and I found something else to listen to. Should I give it another shot? I liked his series about the Roman Republic.
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Dec 27, 2013 00:02
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Niall Ferguson's deal is that he is very talented, educated at the very best institutions, and wrote very good work early in his career, but rather than continuing to do serious history he chose to work his way into a position as court historian and pet intellectual for British and American conservatism. Pankaj Mishra's fierce takedown of Ferguson in the Guardian is a great read and a good explanation of why Carlin's citation of The Pity of War turned me right off. He's basically a Tory piece of poo poo who writes books about how we'd all be better off if stuffed shirt Brit aristocrats had ruled the world forever.
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Dec 27, 2013 01:52
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Koesj posted:Doesn't Mishra reserve far tougher words for Ferguson's later work though? I think most people ITT would agree that Ferguson's total body of work points to him being an insufferable shitheel, but the article you linked to goes into how he developed these views over the years, which has implications in the way you might look at his earlier stuff. This is exactly the issue. Considered in isolation you might have a different and better impression of The Pity of War than the one you get when you look at it as part of his declining body of work. quote:Plus, after reading Ferguson's replies, I'm not sure I'm very comfortable with Mishra's diatribe either. I'm not sure we're reading the same exchange. Ferguson comes off very very poorly there.
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Dec 27, 2013 03:49
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Is there truth to the idea that the North Vietnamese had an ulterior motive to the Tet Offensive where they expected the Vietcong forces to become depleted so much that they wouldn't be a factor politically after the war was over? I swear I read that somewhere or I may have just had a feverdream I don't know. No. There was difference of opinion in the Vietnamese communist movement about how to prosecute the war against the United States. The Viet Cong and other southerners were actually most closely associated with the faction that supported aggressive offensive operations like the Tet Offensive. They declined in influence partly because of the losses incurred by Tet and partly because they lost credibility for having supported it and caused the deaths of so many. The faction that wound up leading Vietnam after the war and that in your theory would have planned the Tet Offensive as a trick to betray the southerners, actually opposed Tet.
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Jan 7, 2014 13:06
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a travelling HEGEL posted:That argument reminds me of that piece of British nonfiction writing where the author looks into the eyes of a young woman poking a stick up a frozen drain in some godforsaken area of London and he says that it's not the case that these people don't know enough to suffer and therefore don't need socialism, they're still suffering even though suffering is all they've ever known. Was that Orwell? Road to Wigan Pier, great book. Orwell spends about half the length just talking about the crazy poo poo that people come up with to blame the poor and unemployed for their own troubles.
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Jan 24, 2014 01:41
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Arquinsiel posted:I just have a great image of a sleepy Chirac in an olde-timey nightcap going "Mmmhmmm, mmmhmmm, I see.... mmmhmmmm." and then after he hangs up his wife asks "What the hell did he want?" and Chirac is all "I have no loving idea". Oh Dubya I imagine that was an interesting time for other world leaders, because the leader of the world's most powerful country was so obviously incompetent and on top of that a generally weird guy. Like when he came up behind Angela Merkel and started rubbing her shoulders, that was just nuts, it shouldn't even have occurred to him to do that at all. You can imagine a lot of stuff like that. There was a great story that a former US ambassador put out, maybe apocryphal but seemingly true, that Bush was having a meeting with some Iraqi exiles in January 2003, and midway through the meeting they all realized that Bush had no idea there was a difference between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. And they kind of stopped to explain to him, you know, the reason we don't work together against Saddam is we've been fighting one another for over a thousand years and it's still an ongoing murder situation, even today. And Bush was amazed. This was a couple months before the invasion. I just think about the sinking feeling those guys must have had when they realized the president didn't know something that was maybe the most basic, important factor in Iraqi domestic politics and culture, and he was planning to invade and take over their country in the next few weeks.
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Jan 25, 2014 19:16
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Isn't Dan Carlin citing Neil Ferguson in his podcasts on WWI? That isn't good. I was actually the one who originally whined about that in this thread, but on balance I thought the first episode was ok. It's not like Carlin is doing "Niall Ferguson's WWI podcast," he's citing a variety of sources. Also that is just something that you have to deal with as you become well-informed about history, as with any topic. "Laypeople" will cite sources or repeat arguments or factoids less because they're substantive and more because they're interesting. The Pity of War was an interesting book because Ferguson advanced a daring thesis that challenged conventional wisdom. A scholar with knowledge of the topic would know that Ferguson advanced beyond his lines of supply--his evidence--but Carlin is an enthusiastic amateur. Anyway I enjoyed the first episode. I haven't listened to the second but I'll probably do so in the next few days. Incidentally I was reading Ferguson's wiki entry just now to make sure I was spelling his first name right and I noticed that in the section for The Pity of War it states that he disagreed with the Sonderweg thesis. That caused me to do a double take, because disagreeing with the Sonderweg thesis in 1998 is, uh, not exactly daring. That fight was more of an '80s thing.
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Feb 5, 2014 01:12
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Anti-tank guns had a few advantages over AFVs (armored fighting vehicles). The kind of gun you could put on a tank was limited by how much room was in turret, how large was the turret ring, how much weight the engine could bear, and so on. This meant that you could get bigger AT guns into the field than you could mount on vehicles, and they were also quicker to design and produce so you could rush them into service as a stopgap if some new enemy AFV made your existing weaponry inadequate. The German 7.5cm Pak 40 was in service in numbers quite some time before any German tank mounting equivalent firepower was available. They were also massively cheaper than AFVs, so you could build a lot of them for the price of a tank. They were also less bulky than AFVs and consequently much easier to camouflage for use in ambushes. The Soviets in particular were fond of what they called "anti-tank fronts", which was a camouflaged strongpoint bristling with anti-tank guns, defending by infantry with a good supply of anti-tank rifles, with the approaches covered by anti-tank mines and converging fields of fire. These were formidable obstacles. Finally, in an exchange of fire with something like a tank, a gun could usually sustain a higher rate of fire because the loader had more help and wasn't doing his work stuffed inside a cramped turret. Against all that, you had to of course weigh the fact that the AT gun was unarmored and not particularly mobile, which are pretty big disadvantages. As the war proceeded and AFVs kept getting bigger, better armored, and more powerful, AT guns began to wane in effectiveness. Lighter guns like the German 5cm, Soviet 45mm, and so forth lost their edge somewhat early on but kept being used because they were cheap, effective against lighter vehicles, and capable on occasion of damaging heavier ones to some useful extent. Meanwhile on the other end of the scale AT guns heavy enough to defeat any enemy tank they were likely to encounter started to push the limits of practicality. AT guns of about 100mm like the Soviet BS-3 could defeat virtually any practical tank out to 1000m but were themselves pretty unwieldy to deploy. In the postwar period, the AT gun became obsolescent because of some key technical advances. Firstly, the increasing mobility of tanks and mechanized infantry made it difficult for fixed guns to keep up. Even during WWII it was kind of hard for AT guns to keep up, but during the Cold War tanks got a lot more nimble very quickly. Secondly, other weapons systems emerged that fulfilled the same role more effectively. The early Cold War period saw the development of recoilless rifles that were much more compact and mobile than large AT guns, but could match their performance with powerful HEAT rounds. Still later, ATGM systems could fire precisely-guided HEAT missiles with great accuracy at even longer ranges, and did so in a package that could be operated by an infantry team. AT guns continued to be used, mainly in Warsaw Pact and Chinese service, but their relevance is sort of iffy and I think were mainly kept around for export purposes and a sort of "why not have that capability just in case", rather than being expected to be genuinely useful.
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Feb 7, 2014 00:22
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Don Gato posted:Man, now it's going to be even weirder when friends ask me what my sources are. At this stage I think the main problem will be your citing goons in IRL conversations.
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Feb 9, 2014 05:49
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LordSaturn posted:Do recoilless rifles count? They're kind of a pet fascination of mine - a very clever thing to build, but basically worse than a missile or rocket in every possible way. The Carl Gustav entered service in the immediate postwar period (1946) and improved versions are still in use by the military number of different countries, including the USA. It's still useful because it can be carried and operated by a team of 2 infantrymen but can accurately deliver shells against targets at ranges greater than 1200 meters. It's a better option for these purposes than AGTMs because the shells are cheap, whereas a Javelin missile has a unit cost of like $80,000. I think that's kind of interesting.
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Feb 14, 2014 02:15
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grover posted:Also, the Aztecs and Maya had metal tools and the wheel, they just chose not to use them. (Lack of pack animals is a poor explanation; even a simple wheelbarrow is a huge labor multiplier, and not challenging to build.) And yet we run into historical situations such as the Romans having knowledge of the wheel and of course commonly using wheeled vehicles like carts and chariots, but not wheelbarrows. Or at least leaving no record of using them, in spite of their engineering genius. Did the Aztecs perhaps fail to use the wheel for practical purposes because Tenochtitlan was an island in lake Texcoco and transportation around the immediate area was most efficient by canoe?
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Feb 15, 2014 21:57
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Arquinsiel posted:That works out at more like six litres a week than one. People are talking about the navy ration, which was a half pint daily, working out to about eight shots of rum that was 57%+ ABV. I think in the Indian ocean it was sometimes supplemented or replaced by Arak, which could be even more alcoholic. I think the one litre a week referred to a ration issued to colonels in the British Army, to which I would just point out that officers were supposed to be gentlemen with some kind of independent mean. Beyond the minimum government issue they supplied their own uniforms, equipment, and stores, including food and booze. Social interactions like entertaining other officers and hosting dinners was an important and often expensive part of the job, so that colonel probably has his own supplies of wine and better-quality foods following him around in the baggage train. I don't think a junior officer who didn't spend a lot of money looking right, giving dinners, and making a good impression would ever advance as far as colonel. Though of course that would be subject to the demands of campaigning and it might have to be left behind, or he might run out in an extended campaign. I think that issue of a weekly litre of rum is intended to supplement his stocks and help him get over during a tough campaign. Just speculating, though.
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Feb 20, 2014 14:04
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Frostwerks posted:I remember reading on these forums a long rear end time ago and maybe in this thread's forerunner, the GBS history thread or maybe even an LF mil-hist effort thread that the labyrinthine side streets and alleyways of Paris in the Revolution were conducive to the uprising. I think the reasoning suggested was that thanks to the flighty local belligerents, the topography was great at breaking up troop units into smaller and smaller and more diffuse elements that lost their advantages of massed musket volleys and led to their loss of cohesion and chaotic defeat in detail. There was an implied addendum that the transition to broad avenues of post-revolutionary Paris was to counteract a repeat performance of just such an uprising. I've learned enough from these threads and others that what you've heard and read doesn't necessarily imply historicity and I'm just kinda wondering about how stupid/ how insightful/ or how incidental this hypothetical mattered to the course of history. Part of this has to do with the legendary barricades of the French Revolution. Barricades were not only a tactic repeatedly used by revolutionaries but also as a result they were the major symbol of political revolution, a recurring motif in songs, paintings, etc. Haussmann's use of wide boulevards throughout Paris made it much harder to construct effective barricades. Open spaces also made for wide fields of fire, and since the government could rely on having the advantage in firearms and artillery over any potential revolutionaries. As others pointed out in response to this post, contemporary observers grasped that immediately, and because of the rhetorical importance of barricades they took special notice. It's likely that Haussmann considered military security at least as a fringe benefit to wide boulevards, but really his main purposes were to improve sanitation, transportation, fire safety, and the aesthetics of Paris. My favorite instance of civic infrastructure for counter-revolutionary purposes is less well known and more particularly American. Many large American cities have large, sturdy armories built in the late 19th and early 20th century to serve as headquarters, supply bases, and rallying points for national guard regiments. Not coincidentally, during the same period of history state governments heavily relied on national guard units as shock troops to defend the interests of capital in times of labor unrest. Did these armories spring up like weeds in America's major cities to serve as fortresses from which the national guard could combat urban revolt? It's an interesting idea, anyway.
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Feb 28, 2014 02:03
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Having read neither book, what was the controversy and feud between the books Ordinary Men and Hitler's Willing Executioners? I know Ordinary Men is near unanimously regarded as the superior scholarly work but HWE is far more popular. My paperback copy of Ordinary Men has an appendix that is just the exchange of letters between Browning and Goldhagen about which of them was right. If you have a copy with that section or you can find one to borrow I can't think of a better resource for learning about that controversy. The second time I read through Ordinary Men it was for an assignment, and the prof said that rather than read Hitler's Willing Executioners, which he thought was a waste of time because of its scholarly inferiority, we would read the Goldhagen-Browning debate and discuss it.
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Feb 28, 2014 17:05
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The question of Japanese involvement against the USSR was basically settled in August-September 1939. First, the German government concluded the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with the Kremlin. The basis of the German-Japanese diplomatic understanding was common hostility to communism (e.g. the Anti-Comintern Pact), so when the Germans unveiled the M-R Pact to the world without even a glimmer of advance warning to the Japanese, they were very shocked. The kind of trust and cooperation necessary to justify a decision like going to war against the USSR to support Germany simply didn't exist between the two countries after that. Second, the Soviets gave the Japanese Army a tremendous kicking at Khalkin Gol, which really soured them on the idea of going north. These two shocks caused the Japanese government to collapse, with the entire cabinet resigning. The Japanese government was never particularly stable but what followed was a series of cabinets headed by Prime Ministers who favored distancing Japan from the Axis powers and a neutrality pact with the USSR. This turned around with Tojo, who was very pro-Axis, but he was a firm advocate of the Southern position of attacking the USA and Allied powers because he believed that they were the more important obstacle to victory in China and the rest of East Asia.
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Mar 11, 2014 02:29
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Slavvy posted:I thought Afghanistan was invaded to satisfy internal American political pressures and that most of the people calling the shots were well aware that it wouldn't achieve anything RE winning the war on terror/finding bin laden? The invasion of Afghanistan actually made a certain degree of sense because the Taliban was a state sponsor of Al Qaeda and that did constitute a strategic problem that we had good reasons to want to resolve after 9/11. Also you shouldn't overrate the cynicism/awareness of the people in the Bush administration who were in charge of making that call. I remember them being criticized by Mideast experts back then because they had this tendency to talk about Al Qaeda as if Al Qaeda's objectives were a real problem to be confronted as opposed to the millenarian fantasies that they are. I would say that the neoconservatives and Al Qaeda both shared the belief that we were in a clash of civilizations and they were at the tipping point of history, and if that sounds insane it's only because it is. The Machiavellian puppetmaster is a stock character in fiction but IRL people mostly believe their own bullshit. That is, they believed that there was a War on Terror that could be won, and absolutely had to be won. In that sense it was imperative to invade Afghanistan and crush not only Al Qaeda but also the Taliban, because they were really just two heads of the Islamist (also known to morons as "Islamofascist") hydra. There's also the really brute level that Tom Friedman was getting at when he wrote: quote:Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business. Friedman was entirely serious about this, and he's the definition of an elite opinion-making columnist. So I would say Afghanistan was invaded at least in part because the people running the USA believed at least somewhat that they were living at the end of history and it was necessary to the triumph of Western Civilization over backward Asiatic Superstition, and also because it made them feel like real tough guys. One of the things that you can learn from getting deep into history is that sometimes really important people with enormous power and responsibility are just bad at their jobs and/or shockingly ignorant. The go-to example in A/T history threads has been Hitler and his inner circle, and that ground is well-trodden, but there's no shortage of case studies. That aside, there were some good reasons to invade Afghanistan. In terms of restoring public confidence, which in spite of being illogical and emotional is a real and important thing, the USA had to be shown to be reacting effectively and punishing the people who had attacked it. Additionally it went a long way towards preventing another attack, because it did crush Al Qaeda's operational strength. That's referring to the invasion, though; the occupation has been an absurdly expensive boondoggle and we'd have been better off finding our way out a decade ago.
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Mar 17, 2014 03:00
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ThomasPaine posted:1) Could explain to me how the Bolsheviks were able to triumph over the White Army et al? I know they had a substantial number of trained soldiers, but I'm led to believe that the Whites had far more, in addition to most of the old experienced military leadership and the Cossacks. Probably the most important factor in the Bolshevik's eventual victory was their strategic position in the center of Russia. They controlled Moscow and Petersburg and many of the other principle cities from the outset. Most of Russia's manufacturing base was in their territory, as was the better part of the transportation infrastructure and a big chunk of the population. It also meant, very significantly, that the White forces were divided from one another by Red territory. The different White armies were also led by rival generals and there was no effective coordination between them, so the Bolsheviks were able to take them on separately and use interior lines to shift forces from front to front as needed. You also shouldn't overestimate the importance of regular troops and experienced officers to the conduct of the Russian Civil War, because the army had basically disintegrated as a result of the two revolutions. Most of the fighting on both sides was done by hastily thrown together irregular units. The low average quality of the soldiers involved can be demonstrated by the outsize effect of the few regulars who actually remained in action, most notably the Czech Legion, who basically cruised around Siberia trashing everything they came across until finally the Bolsheviks just let them buy their way home. The huge geographic area in which the fighting was taking place and the relative weakness of the units involved also created a style of warfare that was very different from WWI, so being an experienced officer wasn't necessarily the huge advantage you'd expect because you still had to learn how to fight a fast-moving war of maneuver with lovely irregular troops. The Red Army started with a large deficit in quality but expanded quickly and built a new officer corps through the school of hard knocks. They also had a lot of defecting Tsarist officers, particularly in the early going. quote:2) Possibly related to 1), what were the military benefits/costs of political commissars in the ranks? Were they ultimately a useful innovation or a harmful one? Dual command with political officers was probably an unavoidable expedient for a couple of reasons. Firstly, lack of training and poor discipline made troops on both sides unreliable. They would break and run at inconvenient times, desert, commit various crimes, etc. To be effective these units had to handled very firmly and with frequent resort to capital punishment. Secondly, the Red Army needed to rely on professional officers from the old dissolved Tsarist army, many of whom were dubiously loyal and might prefer to be fighting with the Whites if they had the option. These men had to be watched closely for obvious reasons, hence the attachment of political officers with veto power over their orders.
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Mar 20, 2014 19:20
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gradenko_2000 posted:1. What was it about Yorktown that made it such a poo poo defensive position? The impression I got was that Washington knew and Cornwallis should have known and was a dumbass for deciding to go there. I admit I looked this up just now, but Cornwallis didn't decide to go to Yorktown. He was under orders to fortify Yorktown so it could be used as a port and base of supply for a planned campaign against Virginia. It would appear that Yorktown was chosen more because the location was convenient for that purpose than for its defensibility. The British probably expected that if Cornwallis were pressed, they could supply, reinforce, or if necessary evacuate his forces by sea. Unfortunately for them de Grasse drove the Royal Navy out of the Chesapeake, which doomed Cornwallis.
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May 6, 2014 16:10
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Muammar Gaddafi might qualify, depending on whether you consider him a "head of state" at the time he was killed. It's a bit iffy considering he was on the run from the people who had just overthrown his government.
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May 16, 2014 22:55
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bewbies posted:This in turn means that the U-boats (and maritime aircraft) have free reign over the North Sea, the Celtic Sea, the Channel, etc. This would have likely caused American political opinion to swing strong against intervention in Europe, This is the main thing I don't understand about your scenario. Why would a drastically more aggressive anti-shipping campaign by the Germans make the USA less likely to intervene, as opposed to more likely since it would probably involve attacks on American-flagged and -owned shipping, even if only by mistake?
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Jun 10, 2014 01:28
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During the Paris Peace Talks in 1972, the North Vietnamese launched a major conventional offensive, which in the US is called the Easter Offensive. By this time American ground forces had already been withdrawn and the USA's contribution to the South Vietnamese defense was mostly confined to air power and strategic/tactical advisors. However, US air power over Vietnam was still tremendous and with that backstopping the ARVN they were able to hold the North Vietnamese to limited territorial gains and secure a ceasefire which led into the Paris Peace Accords. There actually was a kind of pause in operations from 1973-1975, partly because the North Vietnamese military had taken a serious beating in the Easter Offensive, with the two Vietnams mainly engaged in low-level border skirmishing. In the meantime the US Congress was reacting legislatively to popular anger and general loss of faith in government resulting from Vietnam War opposition and the Nixon scandals. Among other things the president was specifically not allowed to intervene in Vietnam again, meaning there would be no air support for the ARVN this time. With that in mind, the North Vietnamese built their forces back up in preparation for another general offensive in the spring of 1975, and this time the ARVN and the Republic of Vietnam just fell apart. The ARVN pretty much wouldn't fight and their units tended to just disintegrate on contact with the North Vietnamese, and the civilian and military leadership of South Vietnam had no idea what to do, so the end came quickly and at little cost to the Communists.
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Jun 14, 2014 13:38
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P-Mack posted:In honor of yesterday's events in Brazil, can someone elaborate on the current understanding of Spanish decline in the early modern period? My entirely unresearched understanding is Not exactly. What you're talking about here is a simplified narrative that tends to be pushed forward at a pop-history or maybe high school level. So it hasn't been replaced by a more nuanced understand, exactly. The more nuanced understanding has been around a long time at a higher grade level, so to speak. In order: quote:1) Get rich as hell off of New World gold and silver. Another part of it is that ships laden with precious metals are an easily understood symbol of money coming in, but taxes and duties on trade are just as if not more important. Spain's wealth exploded partly because of the New World colonies but perhaps more significantly because the King of Spain inherited a bunch of very wealthy territories. Cliff's Notes version, as a result of intermarriage and fortuitous circumstances, one man named Charles Habsburg inherited half of Europe including Spain right around the time that "Spain" began its ascendancy in the New World and in Europe. There's a real opportunity to get lost in the weeds on this topic because Charles V is one of the most important white guys of the past 1000 years if not longer, but I'll skip it for now. For one lifetime Spain was actually part of an enormous inherited empire that included a lot of Europe, including most of the best bits like the Netherlands and so on. In the modern period where we look at states as entities people look back on Spain at this time as a powerful country, but really it's part of a collection of titles. Anyway, after Charles got sick of being The Man he abdicated and split up his possessions into Spanish and Austrian halves. Spain got Spain (duh), Portugal, the better parts of Italy, and the Netherlands. A big chunk of the revenue for Spain came from the Dutch and Italian possessions. quote:2) Spend pretty much all of it fighting the Turks, the Dutch, the English, the French, etc etc. The English make much of defeating the Spanish Armada and you'll even read them claiming that it was the death knell of Spanish hegemony. In actuality the Spanish turned around and built a new fleet better than the one they'd lost. What really killed them was losing Portugal and the Netherlands, which was very damaging to their income, at the same time that they had to fight repeated, extremely expensive wars against France. It was the wars with France that finally bankrupted Spain. quote:3) While this is going on, destroy Spain's domestic real economy through a combination of apathy, corruption, and incompetence. In addition, there was a general demographic decline across basically the entire planet during the 17th century, and Spain was particularly hard hit. The population decline and concomitant loss of tax base coincided with the further loss of extensive lucrative territories in Portugal and the Netherlands, and continuous expensive wars against France. In sum, I think people generally want to look at history and be able to pick out particular causes for things that happen, preferably involving human agency. Spain must have declined because somebody hosed up, right? That's not always the case, though. Sometimes underlying conditions come together and other times they come apart. The above is a pretty rough introductory summary thing, if you had questions I could probably go on.
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Jun 20, 2014 03:56
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P-Mack posted:Thank you for the effort post, in case you couldn't tell I never took a class on the subject past high school, so I knew I was wrong and was curious to know exactly how. I guess the part I'm most curious about was why Spain would have been harder hit by demographic decline then the rest of Europe. Was it purely a matter of geography and climate, or were there other factors involved? It's honestly beyond my expertise. What I know about the 17th century crisis is that human societies in pretty much every region of the planet appear to have been under serious stress at around the same time, and some of them were worse off than others, Spain among them. Sometimes its easier to say what happened rather than why. quote:Also, could you expand a little more regarding how the tax system worked and how did it react (or not react, as the case may be) to the changing demographic circumstances? In most of the world up through the modern, post-French Revolution period or so, governments collected taxes pretty haphazardly. Basically a person with the right connections or a lot of money could beg or buy a position as a tax collector, which made him responsible for going out and collecting a certain amount of money in poll taxes from his designated territory. Pretty much just a tax per person for being alive where the tax farmer could see you. Any extra beyond his estimated obligation, the tax farmer got to keep, which was why people wanted the job. In an emergency it was conceivable to just do a straight confiscation, which is what the Castilian crown did in the Inquisition; they just took the Jews' stuff in the process of expelling them. As to how that system reacted to demographic change, not very well. The apparatus of the modern state as we know it, with stuff like professional officials, statistics, regular censuses, archives, etc. etc. is all pretty new within the past 200-250 years or so. Social sciences like economics can trace their antecedents to about the same time frame. By the renaissance period rulers understood the utility of conducting censuses but they couldn't do it regularly, and record-keeping and information-gathering were inconsistent as well. If you were a king the first you would hear about a problem would probably be news that there was a cholera epidemic and then your tax farmer in the area would say that he couldn't make his nut this year because half the people in his district died. Revenue flow of a more regular and substantial nature for monarchs usually came from customs duties, excise taxes, royal monopolies, and so forth. For example the king might get a fixed amount of money every time certain goods are sold at market, like he gets a piece of every sack of wool traded in London. Or the king has the exclusive right to sell salt, and he can grant that monopoly to merchants for a percentage of their ongoing profits. That kind of thing. Those sorts of taxes are based on transactions so they're easier to collect and they also scale with economic activity. I think the big example of this was that the King of France held the monopoly on sugar trade out of Haiti, and that alone accounted for some huge percentage of total revenue, like half. Anyway if there was a decline in economic activity, perhaps due to population decline, revenue would decline in kind. Incidentally this is why the Netherlands and Italy were so important to the Spanish Empire; as hotbeds of trade and manufactures they represented a lot of taxable economic activity. Anyway, you can probably see that one big problem with how this sort of tax system works is that it taxes producers. Clergy and nobility were invariably exempted from poll taxes, and they didn't do much trading so they didn't have to pay duty on anything, so they held most of the wealth, collected income from rents, and paid no taxes. If you were a kingdom that was, say, involved in endless wars against most of the continent, you could very well wind up strangling the people who make the economy work.
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Jun 20, 2014 05:33
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Non-sapient posted:EvanSchenck, effortposting like that is what makes this forum worth the bux. Actually this one isn't hugely complicated. France was the largest and most populous polity in Europe, also among the wealthiest. Also, partly as a result of how the Hundred Years War shook out, it was administratively centralized around the King of France. Not coincidentally he was among the first monarchs to develop a professional standing army and had the best artillery on the continent. That is, France was a really big and rich country that was also very well-run when it came to fighting wars. Therefore the King of France tended to do well in wars. In aggregate the Habsburg possessions were bigger, but they were also spread out all over Europe whereas France was compact. They were also divided into a lot of different principalities that were ruled by the same man or dynasty, but were still administratively separate. All this made it harder to coordinate resources and led to a higher risk of fracturing, and in the end large parts of the Spanish Empire wound up breaking away, to France's advantage.
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Jun 20, 2014 13:32
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Cyrano4747 posted:To start with, it's important to recognize that there really isn't a time when Central Europe wasn't a major factor in European politics or European power structures. I should also say from the outset that a lot of the very latest scholarship is really challenging the old notion that it primarily existed as a vacuum, an absence on the geo-political map of Europe, between the fall of the Carolingian empires and the rise of a politically powerful Prussia. There is a lot of work going on right now that's re-evaluating just how important the Holy Roman Empire was and how much real power they wielded, especially compared to traditional estimations of medieval/early modern France and Britain which might have somewhat over-emphasized how centralized and focused they really were. Mack Walker in German Home Towns looks at this issue from the perspective of towns and small localities in the Holy Roman Empire, and he makes some interesting arguments. Traditionally the test of whether a political unit was successful in a historical sense is to determine how much rear end they kicked in wars, but Walker sort of says, hang on, why is that the only measure of success? What if the purpose of the HRE from 1648 on wasn't to fight wars, which by then they'd probably had enough of, but rather the purpose of the HRE was exactly the opposite. It was supposed to avert wars, stymie ambitious princes, and protect local traditions and self-rule from the overweening nobility. Ordinarily a historian looks at these things as roadblocks to progress because they basically consist of stopping the state from doing stuff (the HRE as power vacuum), but as far as most people were concerned the stuff that the early modern state wanted to do was a lovely deal all around.
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Jun 21, 2014 00:33
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StashAugustine posted:A friend of mine claimed that not only did blacks fight for the south in the Civil War, but were allowed to become officers while the US prevented them. On a scale of 1 to Calhoun, how full of poo poo is that? The last time this came up I found an article from the Harvard Gazette. quote:Though no one knows for sure, the number of slaves who fought and labored for the South was modest, estimated Stauffer. Blacks who shouldered arms for the Confederacy numbered more than 3,000 but fewer than 10,000, [John Stauffer] said, among the hundreds of thousands of whites who served. Black laborers for the cause numbered from 20,000 to 50,000. and so on Schenck v. U.S. fucked around with this message at 14:08 on Jul 5, 2014 |
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Jul 5, 2014 14:05
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Pornographic Memory posted: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? Allegedly, the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang. The story is kind of complicated but basically there was a wealthy merchant named Lu Buwei. He met a prince Yiren of the Qin kingdom who was being held hostage in another of the kingdoms that made up China at the time. He made friends with Yiren and managed some palace intrigue to have him designated as the crown prince and heir to the throne of Qin, and released from where he was being held. Lu Buwei then set Yiren up with his own concubine, who was supposedly already pregnant with Lu's child. When Yiren succeeded to the thrown that concubine became chief consort, the child Zheng became heir, and Lu Buwei became the power behind the throne. Yiren died only a few years after becoming king and was succeeded by that kid, with Lu Buwei functioning as regent. There's a lot of sordid and often ridiculous twists in this story that I won't get into but the quick version is that after Zheng attained majority and began ruling in his own right he smashed anybody who might threaten his control of Qin. This included Lu Buwei, who got stripped of his authority and his land and who committed suicide rather than wait to be finished off. After a lot of aggressive campaigning against the other Chinese Kingdoms, Zheng eventually conquered everybody and became the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang. This story was probably fabricated much later on to make the first emperor look bad, because he was a pretty controversial and unpopular figure for conquering everybody by force and then becoming a paranoid dictator. All the same, it's the popular version of events.
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Jul 7, 2014 05:31
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Cyrano4747 posted:The Battle of Cajamarca is probably one of the more extreme examples you can find, with a force of about 160 routing a force of ~3,000-10,000 depending on whose numbers you believe. The spanish only had 16 guns and 4 (very small) cannons, but the 60-odd horse played a huge role in terrorizing and routing the Inca, who really didn't have much familiarity with them. The net effect was devastating, yielding a completely lop sided battle. Spanish success at Cajamarca was due partly to their cavalry and arms, but mostly to the Inca believing they were going to a peaceful meeting. Atahualpa met Pizarro within the narrow confines of the city with only a fraction of his army, and he instructed those retainers to leave their weapons outside. Contemporary Spanish sources state pretty openly that Pizarro knew that he couldn't hope to defeat the Inca in an actual battle, so he hoped to replicate what Cortez had done with Montezuma by betraying the Inca and seizing Atahualpa by coup de main. The Spanish attack took the Inca completely by surprise and Atahualpa was captured immediately, and his chief councilors were all killed defending him or captured with him, and his leaderless army fled in disarray. The vast majority of his army wasn't even in the city and didn't so much as see a Spaniard before taking flight.
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Jul 12, 2014 03:51
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Cyrano4747 posted:They still killed a few thousand people with a few hundred. No matter the circumstances that's an ugly piece of work, especially within the limitations of the arms they had. It's pretty chilling to think about, because apparently what happened was the buildings and walls of the town formed a defile that neutralized their numbers. Pizarro's men didn't have to fight 3,000-10,000 Incas, they just had to form a line across the plaza and fight the couple hundred right in front of them, then the next couple hundred, then the next, and so on until they'd killed thousands. The Inca army was apparently trapped by the city walls and their own mass and couldn't easily flee until a section of wall collapsed from the sheer press of men and opened an exit.
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Jul 13, 2014 04:50
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Abu Dave posted:Untold: The Story of World War 1 just kinda glances over it but why exactly was Moltke discharged from being in charge of the German militaries planning? His health collapsed, probably from extreme stress attendant on being responsible for so much important stuff that was going so wrong.
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Jul 23, 2014 23:38
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Capoeira Capybara posted:I tried to start at the beginning and read my way through, but this thread is a juggernaut of words! Good news, this is actually the second iteration! The first one is goldmined and has close to 15,000 posts, so you better get to it.
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Aug 6, 2014 06:07
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bewbies posted:I am also very out of my element here, but basically: the SPD gained a spectacular amount influence in Germany from 1890 through the start of WWI, and he was of the opinion was that that trend was going to continue its trajectory such that the Prussians would not be able to sustain their stranglehold on the Empire had the war not begun in 1914 (as this event pretty much unified the Reichstag and ended any influence of dirty peacenik hippies). Had the SPD or another leftist party seized a sufficent amount of political power, they would have immediately undone much of the strain of militarism (to include much of the the reservist system, at least in part, and certainly the naval buildup) that had dominated Germany over the previous couple of decades, which would have made a hair-trigger mobilization and thus a two-front war a strategic impossibility. At the same time, they would have moved away from supporting the A-H regime and perhaps would have even found more in common with France politically. I would tend to point out a few specific problems with this hypothesis. In the order that they occurred to me, (1) It assumes a continuous upward trend in the SPD's political fortunes, which doesn't necessarily follow. They had seen a meteoric rise in party membership culminating in their dominant showing in the 1912 Reichstag election, but realistically there were limits to growth. In the postwar elections in 1919 and 1920 the SPD together with its radical offshoot the USPD (the party's left wing had splintered off over support for the war) collected about right around 40% of the votes, and given the political context of the time that was probably the maximum share that the German left could have commanded. Since we're assuming no Great War, it's very possible that they were peaking in 1912 rather than on their way to permanent political control. (2) It overestimates the influence of the Reichstag over the government of the German Empire. Although they did have the often-cited "power of the purse" and that gave them a large degree of influence, executive power was overwhelmingly in the hands of the Kaiser and his selected appointees. There's actually a great example of this from just before WWI. In 1913 there was some unrest in Alsace-Lorraine and the Reichstag, led by a coalition of the SPD, Zentrum (Catholics), and PPD (liberals) overwhelmingly approved a vote of no-confidence in chancellor Theobald von Bethman-Hollweg. The vote had no real effect, because the Kaiser had sole authority to select his chancellor and ask him to form a government. Speaking of which... (3) The German Empire's political system vested tremendous authority in the Kaiser, and Kaiser Wilhelm II was notoriously a dilettante and autocratic bully. He did not have the inclination--or frankly the ability--to deal with a serious political opposition. Even if the SPD (or an SPD-led coalition) had been able to seize control of the Reichstag and effectively leverage their limited powers, the result would most likely be a long-term power struggle between Wilhelm and the Reichstag. To some extent this was already happening before the war started, and it's possible that the imperial establishment's eagerness to fight in part derived from a hope that war would quell those political conflicts. (4) Most pointedly, when the war started the SPD fell right into line supporting it, so you shouldn't overestimate their commitment to internationalism. I could go on a bit longer but I ran out of time just now.
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Aug 13, 2014 05:14
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Flesnolk posted:Something I found myself curious about, and I figured this was the best thread to ask - the North Korean military once came super close to conquering the whole peninsula and handing the US their first total defeat in war. How did they end up going from that to the huge-but-barely-equipped joke they are these days? North Korea suffered an economic collapse in the mid-1970s and never recovered. As a result they couldn't afford to purchase more modern equipment from abroad, and their military has to make do with '70s-era Soviet export kit. They fell even further in the 1990s after the collapse of the USSR and a major crop failure that led to a famine, and they've been a failed state for the past 20 years or so. This means that their already poorly-equipped military can't afford to train or maintain a very high standard of readiness, and it also leads to ridiculous stuff like the average NK army soldier being like a foot shorter than his South Korean counterpart.
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Aug 13, 2014 23:41
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Hogge Wild posted:What happens to Abrams when it gets hit by an anti-tank missile? Chobham armor is extremely resistant to the HEAT warheads used on anti-tank missiles, and the Abrams maximum armor is often reckoned as equivalent to something like 1300-1600mm of RHA (rolled homogeneous armor). Later model Abrams with the additional depleted uranium would obviously be even tougher. By way of comparison RPG-type weapons top out at around 750mm RHA penetration. The latest Russian ATGMs have warheads that will defeat 1000-1200mm RHA. Hits by either class of weapon to the glacis or turret of an Abrams would probably fail to inflict serious damage. The missile would hit, fail to penetrate, and the Abrams would keep rolling. Hits to the turret have the potential to damage sensitive optics, electronic equipment, or even the gun, but that can be repaired. Hits from those weapons to the sides or rear where the armor is thinner are more dangerous and could result in the tank being disabled or destroyed. Like most tanks, the Abrams would probably be destroyed outright by a top-attack missile like the Javelin, which launches in a high arc to descend vertically and strike the weak top armor. So far it hasn't encountered an enemy with access to those. quote:How good are the anti-missile defenses on modern tanks? Are you asking about their armor, or about active anti-missile defenses? Composite armor like chobham and reactive armor such as that used on most Russian tanks are both very good at defeating conventional HEAT warheads, although reactive armor can be beaten by tandem charge warheads. Active protection systems are pretty new. The Russian Arena system uses a radar on the turret to detecting incoming projectiles, then launches an explosive charge that detonates into a cone of shrapnel that intercepts the projectile. These apparently work pretty well but they have some disadvantages, mainly that you can't use them if friendly infantry are nearby because they're likely to get caught in the detonations.
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Aug 18, 2014 16:40
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