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PrinceRandom posted:War is really depressing. Does it ever get depressing reading about real people killing real people? Boy does it ever. Antony Beevor's Stalingrad and Max Hastings' Armageddon were a real struggle to get through, and I found myself getting viscerally angry at everyone who was behind Gallipoli, Kaiser Wilhelm's dick-waving with the High Seas Fleet and Churchill's myriad hare-brained schemes. I find that it's a better emotional investment than reading about fictional people killing fictional people though, if only because it was there, it happened, it's not within the realm of the hypothetical, and we can learn something from it.
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Nov 14, 2013 10:54
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Unrelated edit: Does anyone know more about the story of Zhukov participating in a wargame in the 1930s where he leads a hypothetical invasion of Russia and he actually makes it to Moscow? I swear I read it once, but I've never been able to find it again and now I'm not so sure.DerLeo posted:It probably goes without saying, but naval artillery greatly varies in effect depending on how and where it hits. Lutzow at Jutland took over 20 hits and only sank a day later, while Invincible took a shell in the turret which sparked a flash fire in the magazine, literally snapping the ship in half and leaving six survivors. But in general, naval gunfire is probably less effective at sinking ships than one might imagine - usually if you get sunk by surface fire, you went down to a sudden accident like Invincible or spent hours under fire gradually getting plastered into ineffectiveness and sink later due to flooding and no ability to control it. Do you know details of the problems with British shells in WWI? Something about them breaking up immediately upon hitting German armor plate and never penetrating, and not just because of the armor. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Nov 14, 2013 |
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Nov 14, 2013 18:04
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Unluckyimmortal posted:With regards to Jutland, the British had a training problem, evidently, in that powder hoist doors were often left propped open to increase reload speed, which made them one penetrating hit to the turret away from exploding. A little tidbit about that -- Beatty's flagship at Jutland, the HMS Lion, almost suffered a similar fate, but the turret commander, after receiving a mortal wound when Q turret was hit, got the hoist door closed and ordered the magazine flooded. Without that stroke of luck, battlecruiser squadron and Britain's newest superdreadnought squadron would have been left leaderless steaming straight for the High Seas Fleet. In that case, the Germans might have been able to profit enough out of the confusion to reduce or entirely remove Britain's superiority in capital ships, which would not have boded well for an allied victory in WWI. The other side of this coin was that a turret flash fire did happen to one of the German battlecruisers with nearly-disastrous results. It didn't blow up the whole ship, but it did cause enough damage that the Germans figured out what happened and how to prevent it. That the Lion escaped total destruction possibly may have worked against the Brits because they didn't think anything was wrong with how they were doing things.
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Nov 14, 2013 20:08
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DerLeo posted:Is it really that drastic though? If Beatty lost his entire command, that puts the UK down 10 capital ships, but Germany:UK is still 21 (assuming no losses) to 27. It imperils England greatly but at some point the High Seas Fleet would probably have to enter a full engagement, maybe later the same day, and they'd have to win that with a quite considerable margin to beat out the UK's higher rate of construction. I don't know about winning the war per se, but without the Battlecruiser Squadron, the High Seas Fleet can pick and choose it's battles almost at will. The morale shift and whatever happens afterwards would be enough to throw things like the blockade and therefore late-war unrestricted submarine warfare into ahistorical paths. Jellicoe definitely comes off as the better commander in Jutland IMO, but he was treated rather unfairly in his time. He never had to win Jutland at all, he just had to make he didn't lose, but Beatty did his damnedest to make even that task difficult.
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Nov 14, 2013 21:05
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Unfortunately, generals are still attacking on too narrow of a front, with no overwhelming superiority in men or material and with no element of surprise. Which works for gradual pushing back of small sectors of the front but is never going to result in the strategic breakthrough needed for a return to mobile warfare.
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Nov 16, 2013 23:50
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Xlorp posted:Any chance it was a deliberate needle by the communications officer? Halsey can't have been the first to figure out how badly he'd screwed the pooch. Sources I've read always portray leaving in the padding as a genuine mistake due to stress / lack of sleep, but the choice of "the world wonders" as a passage from the Charge of the Light Brigade was definitely intentional
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Nov 19, 2013 02:08
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EvanSchenck posted: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. One of the points repeatedly made by David Glantz in his Barbarossa book was that the more successful each German Army Group was, the more their combat power kept getting diluted by splitting off forces into secondary objectives and/or other fronts altogether. The AGN got as far as it did was itself a rather grand accomplishment considering they were trying to pull encirclements with only one Panzer Group (Army?)
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Nov 19, 2013 03:51
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What other options were available to RE Lee on the third day of Gettysburg besides Pickett's Charge? Could he have flanked farther to the east? Attacked somewhere else entirely? I really enjoyed Gettysburg: The Last Invasion but it was on audiobook so I'm not entirely clear on the dispositions besides the fact that Pickett's Charge was a really bad idea.
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Nov 20, 2013 00:01
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Farecoal posted:If the Japanese military was so obsessed with the idea of forcing a ~Decisive Battle~™® with the American navy, why build carriers in the first place? Isn't that doctrine orientated towards battleships? The idea was that naval aviation and submarines would whittle down the USN as they sailed across the Pacific towards the site of the Decisive Battle so that the IJN Battlefleet would have parity or superiority by the time they got there. IIRC the Japanese were counting on a 20% reduction in order to ensure victory given the relative sizes of their battle lines (itself defined by the Washington Naval Treaty)
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Nov 20, 2013 03:18
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sullat posted:I thought the two Japanese reserve carriers were under repair during Midway; one had been damged by a sub and the other had hit a reef. So they didn't have the option of bringing them. One of them was under repair and the other had a depleted air wing. The Japanese might have been able to bring 5 carriers if they merged the Shokaku and Zuikaku air wings together to fill up one deck, but both wasn't in the cards AFAIK
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Nov 20, 2013 03:55
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DerLeo posted:The simpler route is probably for you to pick up a copy of Shattered Sword, since it's a great book and in this thread we're mostly going to recite from it, but said book asserts that the constant attack during the morning prevented the Japanese from making clear decisions or having deck space to rearm since they were busy running CAP. I should really get a copy of that, I only have Craig Symonds' Battle of Midway. What did it say about the Hornet's Flight to Nowhere?
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Nov 20, 2013 04:03
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Is Mahan worth the read simply because of the history behind it, or (also) because he was correct? I guess his writings bore out as far as Tsushima and WWI, but I keep getting it in my head that the Japanese were a little misguided for having bought into him so hard (although I suppose that's hardly Mahan or his writings' fault)
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Nov 26, 2013 21:20
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Not that I'm trying to excuse WWI tactics or anything, but part of the problem was that the Entente's intelligence services were pretty bad and/or were lying: They kept telling commanders that their attacks had killed as many as or even twice as many Germans as had been lost and that Germany would run out of manpower in mere months, which lead figures like Joffre, French and Haig to believe that yeah, we're losing a lot of troops, but just a little more and the breakthrough will come any day now. The real ratio was often much worse, to the tune of 2:1 British and French losses vs German losses during Entente offensives. ArchangeI posted:Was there ever any attempt to sever the raillines by means of air attack or long range artillery? EDIT: bewbies posted:As to the second issues (casualties), is very easy and simplistic to point to WWI and say "lol", but in reality "Butcher Haig" was responsible for far fewer casualties, proportionally speaking, than some generals who we hold up today as pre-eminent: Zhukov, Giap, and, in particular, Robert E. Lee. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Nov 27, 2013 |
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Nov 27, 2013 00:58
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Nenonen posted:It starts to fall apart once the enemy counterbarrage breaks the phone line connecting you and your artillery batteries with your assault troops, making runners the only viable option for coordination - meanwhile the defender has mostly intact underground phone lines and can coordinate his actions with zero delays. How far away was wireless battlefield radio technology?
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Nov 27, 2013 09:11
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Mans posted:In the Soviet side you have at the very least Lev Mekhlis and Budyonny while i never fully understood why Patton was allowed to command anything. I wouldn't consider Patton a bad commander. On the contrary, he was probably one of the few generals with the aggressiveness and mobile drive to match the likes of Rommel, Guderian, Manstein, et al. It's just that what's acceptable for a general in Nazi Germany isn't going to be acceptable for an army of a democracy. MacArthur I would consider to be much worse. Monty was so self-aggrandizing that it ended up affecting his ability to deliver results. And of course Fredendall was crap and it was a good thing that he was replaced so early on. === My own questions: 1. Is there any truth to the idea that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was just part one of a longer-term plan to eventually invade Iran (or was it Pakistan) and therefore gain a port on the Persian Gulf/Arabian Sea, or was that just a Clancy-fueled fever dream? 2. I've read that during the Victorian era/Great Game, a big influence in British/Russian relations was trying to discourage Russia from expanding further into Asia, namely British-occupied Afghanistan and even India. How feasible would it have been for Russia to march an army down there with 18th/19th century technology? gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Nov 28, 2013 |
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Nov 28, 2013 14:31
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The other side of that Halsey story is that Admiral Raymond Spruance was in command of the main USN task force (TF 38) during the Battle of the Philippine Islands in June of that year 1944. Spruance already had a reputation for being a calm, calculating commander to contrast with Halsey's aggressiveness, and Spruance was the commander on the scene during the Battle of Midway. During the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the USN air strikes sank the carrier Hiyo, while submarine attacks sank the Shokaku and the Taiho. In addition, somewhere between 500 to 600 Japanese planes were shot down by the powerful new Grumman Hellcat fighters, absolutely gutting what was left of Japan's trained aviators. Despite this, Spruance's decision to hang back from pursuing the remaining 2 fleet carriers (Zuikaku and Junyo) and light carriers (Ryuho, Chitose, Chiyoda and Zuiho) was considered to be overly cautious, and it's been said that Halsey that much aggressive at Leyte Gulf because he wanted to make up for it - he wanted to catch the carriers that Spruance had allowed to escape. The irony is that Spruance hung back when he was at the helm because he was keeping in mind the IJN's predilection for decoy and diversionary tactics, and when the IJN did make such a play against Halsey, he took the bait hook, line and sinker. EDIT: On a personal note, it surprised me to find out that it was Spruance who was the "battleship man" and Halsey was the naval aviation advocate. EDIT EDIT: I also want to throw in that MacArthur's dick-waving during the run-up to Leyte Gulf needlessly complicated the communications relay system and played a part in the missed signals that resulted in Taffy 3 having to face down the IJN battlefleet all by themselves. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Nov 29, 2013 |
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Nov 29, 2013 22:52
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Arquinsiel posted:Conversely, the two Panzer I that happened to be there made it through fine. That's so cute!  I can imagine the two piddly little things running about while a war goes on all around them.
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Dec 2, 2013 07:57
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Kolodny posted:A World Undone, by G.J. Meyer. I haven't read it in years so I can't really do it justice in a comment, but I remember that Meyer does a fantastic job of capturing the drama and insanity of the war in a way that's easier to follow than in something more academic like The Guns of August. A World Undone is to The Guns of August like having a good battlefield guide walk you though Gettysburg over several days is to Coddington's The Gettysburg Campaign. I'm reading through this too and while I'm only up to 1917 (goddamnit Zimmermann you arrogant sonofabitch) I can already say wholeheartedly that it's an excellent book, but I do also have Guns of August queued up right after.
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Dec 3, 2013 15:24
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Yeah why the hell did the Italians and Austro-Hungarians fight twelve battles of the Isonzo? Was there seriously no other place along the border that was feasible for operations? I mean, given the shittyness of that front in WWII I'm going to guess no, but why did Italy declare on A-H in the first place if it didn't have anywhere to go?
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Dec 3, 2013 21:33
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In that context, how bad of a miss was it for his failing to close his part of the Falaise pocket?
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Dec 4, 2013 17:59
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Why didn't the British have tank destroyers, apart from the ridiculous Archer? As well, why didn't the assault gun concept catch on with the Western Allies? Is it somewhat accurate to assume that the infantry-support-role thing of the Shermans and Churchills and whatnot was the assault gun equivalent?
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Dec 6, 2013 20:36
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How bad was Britain's finances in the wake of WWI? EDIT: Or other countries too, although I'm curious about the UK in particular because it was top-dog before the war. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Dec 8, 2013 |
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Dec 8, 2013 06:32
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Are there any accounts of German soldiers, having broken through the Allied lines during the Spring Offensive in 1918, marveling at the seemingly limitless supply of artillery shells, food, and other provisions and then for the first time coming to the conclusion of "yeah, we're hosed"? I seem to recall reading ones before but I might be confusing it with something else. Maybe when the Germans broke through during the Battle of the Bulge. Pretty sure that story was from the Battle of the Bulge, though no idea if it's true either.
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Dec 9, 2013 09:05
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InspectorBloor posted:The last chapters of "Storm of Steel" tell about that. In the last great offensive, Jünger and his men get into the enemy's trenches they loot everything they can get their hands on. He marvels at the great equipment and the foodstuffs of the allies, while he and the guys are all sick and starved. It's been some time since I read it, but I think he realizes by then that the war is lost. That book is pretty intense. Yeah in a bit of a coincidence I just read through a passage of GJ Meyer's A World Undone when he talks about that as well. A German lieutenant writes about overrunning a rear-area British kitchen during the first day penetration of Operation Michael and there's still bacon sizzling on the pans and a wealth of tobacco and rations that him and his men eagerly help themselves to. Interesting parallel to the Bulge story.
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Dec 9, 2013 13:43
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Rodrigo Diaz posted:Christ yes. The capture of Washington would drastically undermine the authority of the Lincoln's government and at the very least lead to Lincoln's defeat in the 1864 election.
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Dec 9, 2013 16:53
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How did the Germans in WWII manage to run their war economy for so long? My WWI books talk of the starvation in Germany imposed by the British naval blockade, but then also that they couldn't really build effective trucks and armored cars by 1917 because they were all out of rubber - forcing them to construct vehicles with road-destroying steel wheels. Oil would come from Romania and agricultural products and other raw materials I expect were extracted from France and Poland and the other occupied territories, and I do know there was starvation going on in Germany and its occupied territories by 1944 onwards (just not as harped on for some reason), but it's not like there's a lot of rubber to be had even if you controlled continental Europe, but the Germans just kept producing trucks and tanks and planes right up to the end.
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Dec 10, 2013 11:40
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Thanks for the responses re. German industry in WWII. I didn't even think of synthetic rubber. I added Wages of Destruction to my book wishlist Can someone weigh in on the story behind the hoax over the M113 APC being nicknamed the "Gavin"?
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Dec 11, 2013 13:42
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brozozo posted:Since a few "what if X fought Y" discussions have popped up recently, here's an article that discusses a hypothetical battle between Iowa and Yamato. The author quotes Jon Parshall, one of the guys who wrote Shattered Sword, pretty liberally. With the advent of things like laser rangefinders, GPS and computers powerful enough to simulate ballistics very exactingly, naval gunfire should theoretically be very accurate nowadays, yeah? I mean obviously battleships are never going to be in vogue again, but the Iowa's fire control just made me think of the Royal Navy's attempt to force the Dardanelles and how modern tech would have let them lay down fire against coastal gun batteries with precision.
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Dec 12, 2013 03:38
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Phanatic posted:The submarines kill everything so the carriers can keep sending up planes and dropping bombs on things. I was under the impression that ASW technology had advanced to the point where submarines are just (?) one-shot weapons now. Or was that what you meant.
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Dec 12, 2013 15:02
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Bacarruda posted:Well-handled submarines are a serious threat, especially some of the modern diesel-electric boats because they're loving quiet (nuclear powerplants are comparatively noisy). Add in the fact that some subs have cruise missiles, which gives them some standoff capability. Yeah, I did know that diesel-electrics are like a black hole of sound and all that. I just faintly remembered a conversation wherein any modern attempt to conduct unrestricted submarine warfare would end with insurance premiums skyrocketing and then the offending sub being hunted down and destroyed in very short order.
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Dec 12, 2013 15:46
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veekie posted:What makes the difference in the noise level of different subs? A nuc has to run the reactor's coolant pumps 24/7 even when it's otherwise idle, as opposed to a diesel-electric just running on completely silent batteries.
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Dec 12, 2013 16:05
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There was mention of that tactic back in WWI: Machine guns would be fired at high angles to arc the bullets and essentially make it behave as indirect fire with obviously a lot less area-of-effect compared to artillery but IIRC could be adjusted faster. This was used to good effect by the Canadians in Vimy Ridge and then in Passchendaele and even later as they perfected the use of the creeping barrage.
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Dec 16, 2013 17:00
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Pyle posted:I read somewhere that it was common for forward observers in WWII to call fire on their own position if the situation was desperate. Does anyone else remember such occasion or is this just a myth? I remember books making mention of this also being done by Germans and Soviets during the fighting over Stalingrad.
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Dec 16, 2013 21:14
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The Guns of August made a mention of a certain Mr Haldane drawing the ire of the British government when he was asked what kind of army should Britain have, and he answered "a Hegelian army". I'm afraid I'm not getting the context. Help?
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Dec 19, 2013 06:18
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a travelling HEGEL posted:OK, that sounds like a good idea. But airfield or not, can't you take one look at that ground and realize that you are boned, just flat boned, if your enemy gets access to those heights, especially if you have very few guns, especially especially if few of those guns are heavy? Christ, build an airfield somewhere else in the same general region. You're assuming that the French looked at those heights and went "yup, the Vietnamese will be able to haul guns over there" Which they didn't, hence the loss.
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Dec 23, 2013 19:21
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 My sister just gave me this I've never been so excited for a gift!Merry Christmas MilHist thread!
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Dec 24, 2013 17:32
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Nenonen posted:To continue on the theme You sonofabitch. I thought I had forgotten about the depressing story behind this  Reading Antony Beevor's Stalingrad last year was not the best Yuletide literature choice.
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Dec 25, 2013 13:19
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Shattered sword goons, how different is that book from Symonds' book? I got a BN giftcard and would't mind picking it up if its at least some what different. Shattered Sword seems to tackle the subject more from the POV of the IJN, whereas Symonds' book looks at the American side, in particular with a long background on what the American carriers were doing prior to Midway, such as Coral Sea and the raids by the Enterprise and Lexington on outlying Japanese bases shortly after Pearl Harbor (which was the first I had ever known of such action)
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Dec 26, 2013 17:02
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I did go through a full listen of Carlin's WWI episode, but by that time I had already finished Castles of Steel and was maybe a quarter of the way through A World Undone and didn't really pull anything new from Carlin's work aside from his pointing out the relationship between the levee en masse of the Napoleonic Wars and how it shaped the national armies of WWI.
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Dec 27, 2013 02:23
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Anything Ferguson wrote about British foreign policy and especially Sir Edward Grey being the mastermind of an Anglo-German showdown is complete and utter bullshit, and his reading of the Cabinet meeting in August 1911 is almost certainly ludicrously wrong. I only add the "almost certainly" caveat because I haven't actually read Ferguson's account of that meeting, just heard what was said about it by others. Holy poo poo what  What I've read of Grey from A World Undone and Guns of August makes him seem like one of the few rational actors in that shitshow, and leagues less warmongering than, I dunno, loving Churchill or Jackie Fisher.
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Dec 28, 2013 07:49
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