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I believe the Axis and their minor allies also made use of explicit bicycle battalions, particularly during the Fall Blau/Stalingrad campaign. Also, I'm only about a third of the way into Shattered Sword and it really is such a fascinating book. I read Craig Symonds' Midway book last year and this forms a great counter-point because it's written primarily from the viewpoint of the Japanese, breaking down their overall strategy, operational plans, doctrine, equipment and tactics in a manner that really reveals just how different they fought relative to Americans, and how most what-ifs and previous Ameri-centric histories of Midway just doesn't hold up. EDIT: I still have very little love for Stanhope Ring and his lost flight. That guy screwed up so bad it still stands out on a history from the other side. It's as eye-opening as my first delve in David Glantz and the realities of Operation Barbarossa and Typhoon gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 13:59 on Dec 30, 2013 |
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Dec 30, 2013 13:52
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The Entire Universe posted:I know this may be a lot to ask, but how does "A Song of Ice and Fire" align with the Wars of the Roses? Beaten, but yeah it's really more of an "inspired by in broad strokes" rather than "with the serial numbers filed off" level that you'd see in, say, The Lion King or Harry Turtledove.
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Dec 30, 2013 15:23
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The Entire Universe posted:Did Japan have much in the way of planning for repulsing a Russian or Chinese invasion of the home islands? Or was it always "everyone we haven't already conscripted fights to the death with whatever they can get their hands on" for any landing? They weren't really that afraid of a Russian or Chinese invasion of the Home Islands, because they knew that those countries did not have the sealift capability for it. They did not want to piss off the Russians because they wanted to hang on to Manchukuo as a colony of sorts to maintain some semblance of Empire, but otherwise any hypothetical of the Home Islands would be fought in the same broad strokes as an American one in the every-man-is-a-bamboo-fighting-conscript fashion.
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Dec 30, 2013 19:02
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handbanana125 posted:While not quite related to the discussion at hand, I hit up the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Arms and Armor exhibit last week and took a fewof pictures, mostly focusing on 15th century English swords and armor, but I did get a few pictures of the Ottoman muskets. Would anyone like me to post these up as an imgur gallery? Yes, please! I'm also making it my 2014 mission to go to some Mil-Hist related tourist spots and take pictures for the thread. I'm going to Bangkok in April and hopefully other points in the Philippines later in the year.
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Dec 31, 2013 15:31
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The two primary weapons of the submarine were always the deck gun and the torpedo in both World Wars. Evolution in technology mostly came in the form of faster subs, more endurance/range, and more destructive/accurate torpedoes. In World War I, the submarine was still a very new weapon - its modern incarnation was actually invented by an American, and the war started with Britain and France having more and more modern subs than Germany. It's initial use was as scouts or screens for capital ships, and to attack enemy capital ships from stealth. Sinking a battleship or a cruiser without a major engagement was a pretty plum deal. The Royal Navy under Admiral Jellicoe was very well aware of the threat posed by subs as a means for Germany to sink some RN battleships without a fight and so erode at the margin of advantage in dreadnoughts that they had. This fear was taken very seriously indeed when on Sep 22, 1914, three old RN cruisers, the Aboukir, the Hogue and the Cressy, were all sunk by a single U-Boat, U-9, commanded by Kapitanleutnant Otto Weddigen. These three cruisers were all from the turn of the century and were being called the "live-bait squadron" even before they were torpedoed. In retrospect, the cruisers were not zigzagging in violation of orders to do so and further slowed and stopped to help their squadron-mates after the first torpedoing of the Aboukir, which they believed that had 'only' hit a mine. For his accomplishment, Weddigen was awarded Iron Cross and would have a Kriegsmarine U-Boat flotilla named after him in WWII. He would later die on Mar 18 1915 while trying to torpedo the HMS Neptune - he would not notice the HMS Dreadnought running over his boat, ramming and sinking it while setting up a torpedo attack. The economic aspect of submarines sinking merchant ships was not considered for quite a while, primarily due to 'prize rules' - if one were attack merchant shipping, the expectation was that one would declare his presence to the merchant ship, order its surrender, take off its crew, put them in lifeboats, send them off towards the nearest point of land and only then sink the abandoned merchant. These rules are fairly easy to abide by when you're a large sailing ship, or a modern cruiser or battleship, but for a submarine, it just was not feasible. The sub would have to leave itself exposed for several hours while it went through all the steps for humane treatment of the crew, and the relative size of a sub compared to a merchant might even make such efforts impossible: Why surrender to a 600 ton hunk of metal when your cargo liner is several times larger? The first round of Unrestricted Submarine Warfare began on Feb 1915, when the Kaiserliche Marine issued orders to its U-boats to attack merchant shipping without warning. The Germany Navy was actually not all that well-prepared for this, as many of its boats were not up-to-date models and so patrols set up to intercept ships coming in to England was very porous. Nevertheless, the subs did sink so many more ships when they did not have to abide to prize rules and were free to shoot torpedoes without prior warning, a luxury that previously was only afforded against warships or known troop transports. It all came to a stop just 4 months later, May 1915, when U-20 sank the RMS Lusitania. The sinking cost the lives of 128 American citizens, and the possibility of drawing the US into the war was enough to get the German Navy to back down and cancel the campaign. It bears mentioning at this point that the prosecution of Unrestricted Submarine Warfare was a debate that raged on through the German high command since shortly after the beginning of the war. Proponents of the idea argued that it was the only way to strike back at Britain for their naval blockade of Germany, while its detractors cited the navy's unpreparedness to conduct a full campaign and the fear of drawing the ire of the US. For the moment, the anti-sub faction won, with one of the big factors being General von Falkenhayn promising victory in the Western Front through his upcoming Verdun campaign, obviating the need for a diplomatically risky submarine policy. As it turned out, Verdun became a grinding battle of attrition that did not result in a decisive victory and von Falkenhayn was replaced by Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff in Aug 1916. Since the cancellation of Unrestricted Submarine Warfare, U-boats had been relegated to their early-war role of naval support for fleet combat actions - the aforementioned net of U-boats at Jutland designed to sink RN battleships on their way to a decisive battle being the most notable example of this period. This limited policy did not work at Jutland nor at other junctions, but in the meantime the submarine arm of the Kaiserliche Marine had been expanding rapidly - more U-boats, better models. And now, with von Falkenhayn out, the stage was set for the German high command to allow for the reintroduction of Unrestricted Submarine Warfare - von Hindenburg and Ludendorff were willing to use any means at their disposal to win the war, and proponents of the campaign from the navy had drawn up statistics saying that if the U-boats could sink 600,000 tons of merchant shipping per month, Britain would collapse within 6 months. Those standing against a renewed anti-shipping campaign knew that torpedoing merchants so aggressively would definitely draw the US into the war this time, but their objections were overruled by promises that the war would be over by then, that the US would not react in time, that the US would not be able to muster an army large enough to matter, and that even if they did join the war and muster an army the U-boats would prevent them from shipping troops across the Atlantic anyway. Unrestricted Submarine Warfare finally resumed on Feb 1917 after months of preparations and deliberations following von Falkenhayn's dismissal. In Feb 1917, the U-boats sank 400k tons of shipping. In March 1917, 500k tons; in April 1917, 600k tons. By this time however the US had already joined the war, bolstered the Royal Navy by putting American destroyer escorts at the RN's disposal, and the RN itself started implementing the convoy system. At this point I would like to address the question of why it took the RN so long to implement the convoy system. The main reasons come down to: 1. A belief that making groups of ships sail together would simply allow a U-boat to sink more in a single sitting - this was flat-out false - the RN had been effectively running "convoys" of dreadnought battleships escorted by destroyers for years now without major losses to submarines, and even merchant shipping convoys were in effect in the form of a coal cargo route between England and Norway, and ships running that particular route did not suffer heavy losses from submarines 2. A lack of escorts - the warship arm of the RN guarded its battleships jealously and allotted the majority of its destroyers to guarding them. Therefore, it lacked enough destroyers to serve as escorts for merchant ships themselves. This was a fairly valid reason and was offset by the addition of American escorts and an eventual slackening of allocation for the warship fleet once it became clear that the U-boats were a terrible threat to Britain 3. A lack of merchant discipline and technology - prior to official implementation of the convoy system, the Royal Navy invited groups of merchant captains to a conference to ask them about the feasibility of running in a convoy. The overall feeling was that it would either be very difficult if not outright impossible. Ships those days were still coal-fired, which made it difficult to produce consistent amounts of power from the engines, not withstanding that most merchant ships lacked engine telegraphs (read: throttles) which provided enough fine control to allow them to maintain formation. This was eventually remedied by closer coordination with RN officers and having the ships run with destroyer escorts. In the event, simply forcing the captains to man up and do it also worked. As far as methods to attack or destroy U-boats, several approaches were taken: The most basic was simply turning the ship towards the U-boat and trying to ram it, although this would imply having already detected the U-boat in the first place. Depth charges and basic hydrophones (but not active sonar/ASDIC) was also invented and implemented in the latter half of the war, as was aerial patrols (not great considering limits on aeroplane technology) and the famous Q-Ships: merchant ships requipped with guns that would wait until they were attacked only to fight back as a wolf in sheep's clothing. Ultimately though, none of these measures were especially successful in destroying large numbers of U-boats, and the turning of the tide was more in the form of simply reducing losses dramatically via convoys rather than any sort of effective counter-measure. After the implementation of convoying to Atlantic merchants, shipping losses dropped dramatically - and just in time too: The US Navy's liaison to the RN learned that in April 1917, Britain was down to about 3 weeks' worth of foodstuffs and other critical supplies. The Germans came close, but just not close enough - tonnage losses never hit the marks set by the German high command after April 1917, and by Jan 1918 losses were down to just 170k tons. The U-boat fleet never managed to strangle Britain as they had promised, the High Seas Fleet was inadvertently scuttled in Scapa Flow while the post-armistice peace negotiations were still on-going, the Treaty of Versailles imposed strict limits on the size of the new Kriegsmarine, and the stage was set for a new submarine campaign just 21 years later. EDIT: I acknowledge that the original question was with regards to WWII submarines, but I felt that it needed to be put in the correct context by going back to the first Unrestricted Submarine Warfare campaign. I can talk about WWII U-boats in a separate post. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Jan 3, 2014 |
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Jan 1, 2014 05:36
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oXDemosthenesXo posted:Whoa. Did you have that already typed up in some form or did you make that special for us? I just typed that up in an hour or so, but the basic outline had been clunking around in my head for months. As for technical specs, this is going to come from googling, but: U-9, the sub that sank 3 aging RN cruisers on Sep 22 1914: Class - Type U-9 Launched - Feb 22 1910 Displacement - 493 tons Length - 57m Speed - 14.2 knots surfaced, 8.1 knots submerged Best range - 3 250 nautical miles at 9 knots Test depth - 50m Complement - 4 officers, 25 men Weapons - 4x 45cm torpedo tubes (2 bow, 2 stern) with 6 torpedoes carried, and a 50mm deck gun U-35, the most successful U-boat of WWI, with 538k tons sunk: Class - Type U-31 Launched - Apr 18 1914 Displacement - 685 tons Length - 64.7m Speed - 16.4 knots surfaced, 9.7 knots submerged Best range - 8 790 nautical miles at 8 knots (note the dramatic increase, late war KM U-boats could reach the Eastern Seaboard of the US) Test depth - 50m Complement - 4 officers, 31 men Weapons - 4x 50cm torpedo tubes (2 bow, 2 stern) with 6 torpedoes carried, and a 88mm deck gun Type VIIC, the standard U-boat of the Kriegsmarine during WWII Displacement - 769 tons Length - 67.1m Speed - 17.7 knots surfaced, 7.6 knots submerged Best range - 8 500 nautical miles at 10 knots Test depth - 230m Complement - 44-52 men total Weapons - 5x 53.3cm torpedo tubes (4 bow, 1 stern) with 14 torpedoes carried, and a 88mm deck gun As a final point of comparison, the Gato-class submarine, which formed the majority of the USN submarine fleet during WWII (in the Pacific) Displacement - 1 525 tons Length - 95m Speed - 21 knots surfaced, 9 knots submerged Best range - 11 000 nautical miles at 10 knots Test depth - 90m Complement - 6 officers, 54 men Weapons - 10x 53.3cm torpedo tubes (6 bow, 4 stern) with 24 torpedoes carried, and a 76mm deck gun uPen posted:Are there any good books on the WWI submarine war, or the general role of submarines in various navies during that time period? Most of this came from Castles of Steel. Despite the name, Robert Massie spends a lot of time discussing the U-boat war as well, especially since after Jutland there wasn't all that much to discuss with regards to surface actions anyway. Shimrra Jamaane posted:Why were the US torpedoes so loving awful in WWII? I've written many words about American torpedoes. Reposting them there so they don't get lost to archives: quote:One of the primary problems* with US torpedoes was that test shots were usually filled with cement or other inert material, which meant that war shots with explosives in them were much heavier. quote:The gyroscope thing is actually a two-stage series of mishaps:
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Jan 1, 2014 06:50
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That's totally my mistake and appreciated feedback for you to point it out. I omitted it in the running outline I was keeping in my head and so just threw it in there at the last minute without really giving it its proper due. The Q-Ships didn't sink a lot of U-boats (and I daresay nothing was especially effective at sinking U-boats in WWI), but they did represent a significant morale-boosting effort in a war where morale and public perception was as important as anything else, and some Q-Ship engagements were deemed important and heroic enough to merit Victoria Crosses and other such recognition (and in fact my primary source does spend some chapters talking about Q-ships specifically). Another related tactic was the practice of having an RN submarine in tow, to torpedo the U-boat after it had surfaced and stopped the "merchant" I of course have no claim at all to be authoritative, and I acknowledge that my write-up does and will have flaws.
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Jan 1, 2014 14:39
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wdarkk posted:What was the loss rate like for WWI German subs? IIRC the WW2 loss rate was something horrifying like 97% of subs that ever went out to sea were eventually lost at sea. The Germans+Austrians built a total of 375 U-boats during WWI. Approximately 205 of these (54%) were lost to enemy action (ramming, mines, torpedoes, depth charges, gunfire, other/unknown) and then another 171 (46%) survived the war to be surrendered to the Entente, so a fair bit better than how the Kriegsmarine ended up. When the Entente gave their first set of demands to Germany during the armistice, part of it was to order the surrender of 250 U-boats, parceled out to the various nations - France and Italy wanted a bunch for to buff up their post-war navies, Japan wanted some for study, the US and Britain wanted a few as keepsakes. The Germans replied that they did not actually have that many, but I felt that it underscored how seriously the Entente took the threat. http://www.uboat.net/wwi/boats/ http://www.uboat.net/wwi/fates/losses.html http://www.uboat.net/wwi/fates/listing.html bewbies posted:In related news I absolutely cannot imagine how awful and frustrating and horrifying it would have been to repeatedly fire dud torpedoes. You're in a steel tube with a couple dozen other dudes with no showers and bad food for weeks at a time, you do well enough to crawl your tube into an attack position against something, you do all the calculations right to deliver your ordnance, you think you're about to strike a blow for Uncle Sam, and then THUNK. You didn't sink anything, any escorts in the area are now hunting for you, and you just lost confidence in the primary weapon that your military profession is designed to employ. Gross. I know this wasn't exactly what you meant, but American boats did have showers and refrigeration, so your fellow dudes were probably only a few days off from their last shower instead of weeks off, and the food didn't taste like diesel fumes. The Germans though, hoo-boy, I think it was Gunther Prien that outright refused to fire any torpedoes at all in early 1940 until they fixed the torpedoes.
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Jan 2, 2014 03:41
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veekie posted:It does say a lot about how effective they were that they thought there were so many subs around. I can go into more detail when I get around to the WWII effort-post, but an abbreviated version is: The Brits start the war with ASDIC, depth charges and better planes, but forgot the lessons of convoying in the inter-war period. The U-boats are very successful in 1939-1940, although hampered somewhat by their faulty torpedoes. By 1941 the Brits re-implement convoying on a large scale and radar and high-frequency direction finding (Huff-duff) has been invented, but then Donitz starts using Wolfpacks to counter. America enters the war and they've also forgotten everything learned in WWI and Type IX boats waiting off the Eastern Seaboard reap a terrible whirlwind once again. By 1942, all the technology required to fight off U-boats effectively is in place: Radar and Huff-duff can detect incoming U-boats even at night, hedgehogs are better than depth charges since they don't make the ASDIC lose effectiveness, radar-equipped patrol planes can stalk U-boats through clouds and through darkness preventing them from making lots of headway at night and during overcast, escort carriers could provide close-in air patrols for convoys and ULTRA (Enigma codebreaking) can provide clues as to which convoys are in danger of getting hit by Wolfpacks. The only remaining problem was one of resource allocation: There just weren't enough corvettes, destroyers, carriers and patrol planes to go around. Huff-duff and radar might tell you that there's a U-boat just beyond visual range to starboard, but it's also telling you there's about 2 more to port and aft and you've only got 2 DDs to cover a 20-ship convoy and there are no Catalinas or Liberators available because Admiral Ernest King is being stingy and the nearest available carrier is still 150 miles away and you've got torpedoes coming in from 3 different directions and welp. By 1943, production has ramped up enough that convoys have numerous escorts, the Greenland-Iceland gap and approaches to Ireland are all constantly patrolled by long-range aircraft, and there are enough excess destroyers that you can form Hunter-Killer groups centered around escort carriers flying bomb-laden Wildcats to actively hunt U-boats and the tables turn. By 1944/45, there are so many dangers out there to U-boats that your life expectancy is in weeks if not days and as was mentioned earlier in the thread very very few submariners will live to survive the war. Comstar posted:The showers were for 3 people I think - The Cook, the Cook's mate and the medic. Water was too precious otherwise The Ice-Cream maker was an unapproved addition too I think. They did have air-con though, to help prevent circuits blowing. I didn't know that about the showers, so thanks! I don't know if the ice cream maker was "approved", but I do know that the raison d'etre was that ice cream was a reliable way to feed milk/calcium to the men. veekie posted:How good were they against military targets in contrast during WWII? Seems that a sub in the right place at the right time could do a hell lot of damage before sneaking away. Pretty much everyone tried to use subs to attack warships by placing them across likely routes of advance, but this was not very effective in either World War outside of feats of derring-do or lucky breaks. The Germans and Americans both went into the WWII sub business with the expectation that they were going to use it to sink lots and lots of merchant shipping from the get-go. Only the Japanese in WWII continued to practice a doctrine of using submarines to attack warships specifically over merchants, and they were not that successful at it - only 5 American capital ships were ever sunk by submarines, 1 of those was "only" an escort carrier (USS Liscome Bay), 2 of them were already heavily damaged and were arguably only finished off (USS Juneau and USS Yorktown), leaving only 2 "clean" kills (USS Wasp and USS Indianapolis)
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Jan 2, 2014 16:34
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brozozo posted:Finally, a few questions of my own about WWI: A World Undone makes mention of that lack of Russian cryptology as well, but the only other mention of WWI cryptology I've ever read about was with regards to the Germans. The Germans were employing encryption for their messages, but the British managed to capture codebooks from ships in 3 separate instances, and were eventually able to set-up what was called "Room 40" as the WWI equivalent of Bletchley Park. In a manner very reminiscent of what would happen to the Kriegsmarine one war later the British were getting to read all sorts of German naval traffic and this allowed them to force favorable engagements repeatedly even/especially when the Germans were laying down traps for them. The Germans for their part never imagined that their codes might have been compromised and blamed leaks on spies. Unfortunately the immaturity of the cryptological process and the tight controls on distribution of information lead to some moments where Room 40's intelligence was either passed on to commanders in the field late, or not passed on at all, particularly during the Battle of Jutland. And of course no discussion of WWI cryptology would be complete without mention of the Zimmermann Telegram: The Germans had passed the telegram through a station in Sweden, but did not know that that line passed through Land's End in England later on, which meant that the British cracked the message almost immediately. For additional irony, the Germans passed it through a telegraph line in the German embassy in the USA that was set-up specifically to accommodate faster communications between Germany and the US when Woodrow Wilson was trying to set-up peace accords between the warring powers. The German government was by then committed to renewing Unrestricted Submarine Warfare, so Foreign Minister Zimmermann thought that if the US was bound to be drawn into the conflict as a result anyway, then it didn't really matter what that telegraph line was used for now. Anyway, despite already having the decoded message, the British could not yet reveal it to the Americans or risk revealing themselves that they had cracked German codes - they had to wait until the message passed through Mexico and was deciphered before they showed the message to the Americans, claiming that they had stolen the message's contents through human means.
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Jan 3, 2014 03:56
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The Entire Universe posted:Also they ran out of shells drat quick, didn't they? I am recalling something about the consumption outstripping production by a fairly significant margin because of how hosed things were (hence the revolution). The great artillery shell shortage was in the earlier half of the war, 1914-1915 and affected pretty much everyone. Britain did not have a large army and so also didn't have a large armaments industry. The French did not believe in modern concepts of artillery and firepower and did not have large amounts of guns nor large amounts of shells to shoot with. The Germans were probably the most prepared for it, but then couldn't draw up the necessary supplies to keep production up because of the British blockade. And nobody expected that they'd need so very many shells. The Russian War Minister was a corrupt, indolent moron that still believed in cavalry and bayonet charges (because that's how he personally earned glory decades before!) and like the French did not invest a lot into equipping the military with lots of guns, and production woes were further exacerbated by the Ottomans joining the Central Powers - the Russians couldn't bring in supplies through their Black Sea ports nor could they sell exports from the ports to the rest of the world for cash. To be clear, what I'm saying is that horrible horrible mismanagement of the Russian Army was among the causes for the Russian Revolution, but specifically the lack of artillery shells was not part of that. sullat posted:Also, to top it off, the Zimmerman telegram was so goddam stupid, that a lot of people believed it was British propaganda until Zimmerman himself confirmed that it was genuine. I thought it was hilarious in a way how Zimmermann basically went "Oh yeah, that telegram thing to Mexico? TOTALLY US"
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Jan 3, 2014 07:36
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:On a completely separate note, the details for David Glantz's third volume in his Stalingrad Trilogy have been released. It's split into two books. Which Glantz books are worth picking up, by the way? I know the answer is eventually "all of them" since this is the Mil-Hist, but I can't even find a good bibliography. I have "Operation Barbarossa: Hitler's Invasion of Russia 1941" and "CSI REPORT No. 11 - Soviet Defensive Tactics at Kursk, July 1943" on eBook and "Clash of the Titans" on paperback
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Jan 3, 2014 08:46
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veekie posted:Something more recent I'm curious about. How did submarine warfare go back in WWII? Don't seem to hear much about it, other than a few hijinks the Japanese pulled. I'm finding it difficult to frame a single-narrative effort-post around WWII subs in the Atlantic because that is seriously a huge topic to cover that I will most assuredly never cover in sufficient detail, so I'll just throw in what I feel are the most salient points. How did U-boats actually attack? Much the same as they did in World War I - a U-boat would be assigned to patrol a certain section of ocean and wait for eligible targets to pass. Methods of detection could be purely optical (smoke from ships was a nice big tall indicator) or via hydrophones. Once a ship was detected and its course and speed laid out, the U-boat would set up an intercept course. If the ship was close, it might be enough to just submerge and orient the ship to a good firing position (perpendicular to the ship's course). If the ship was some distance off, the U-boat would need to overtake the target, which means running on the surface for more speed, which means running on a parallel course outside of visual range, then closing in before the target arrives at your new waiting spot. The U-boat does have a deck gun, but it was discouraged from use because you need calm waters so you can actually shoot it, an unarmed ship so you don't get shot back (not always something you can establish right off), you need it to be night-time so you can approach without being detected in the first place, and you need the target to be isolated enough from any nearby help that you can take your sweet time shooting it full of holes. Instead, the favored weapon was still the torpedo - lay in wait across the target's bow and sink the target without it ever knowing. If it was night-time, you might not even need to be submerged at all! There's a fair bit of geometry involved since it's akin to pulling lead on a target with a really really slow bullet, but that's a whole 'nother post altogether. What was the wolfpack? The wolfpack was a tactic devised by Admiral Karl Donitz to fight the convoy tactic utilized by the Allies. The Kriegsmarine would have news of a convoy and its likely route, either by prior detections or by other means of intelligence, then it would order multiple submarines to patrol along the likely route like beads on a string. If one of the "beads" finds the convoy, it reports in to Kriegsmarine and shadows the convoy. A U-boat was more-or-less prohibited from attacking a convoy if it was the only U-boat that had made contact, since the U-boat was almost guaranteed to be driven off and lose the critical contact if it attacked and subsequently attracted the attention of any escorts. Instead, the U-boat was supposed to wait until the other members of the wolfpack could close in. The idea was to overwhelm the convoy's defenses. A single destroyer could keep a single U-boat tied down for hours, but half-a-dozen subs all attacking from different angles would be beyond the ability of a few escorts to deal with - even if you could see the U-boat coming and even if a little bit of gunfire or even lighting is all that's needed to spoil one attack, the U-boats way on the other side of the formation (a convoy might have 9 columns of ships, each column 200 meters apart) will then be wide-open. This was especially true in the first half of WWII when escorts were few and far between. Pacific side-note: The Americans had their own version of the wolfpack, but that involved only 2-3 subs that would leave on patrol together and operate as a single tactical unit along the same area, as opposed to German wolfpacks which might be comprised of 6-12 boats all coordinated by the Kriegsmarine through Enigma-coded communications. The Americans did not exercise as much centralized control over their subs, and in any case Japanese convoy doctrine was poor enough that it was not needed as badly. What were the various weapons used to fight off the U-boats? As the war began, the British had hydrophones (passive sonar), ASDIC (active sonar, pinging) and depth charges with which to fight off U-boats. You'd send out a wave of sound, listen for the return echo, use that to get a fix on the sub's location, and drop a barrel of explosives over the suspected location. Unfortunately this did not really help as far as detecting a U-boat BEFORE it shot a torpedo at you or the merchant you're protecting. For that, there was only really the human eye. Aircraft patrolling overhead could help, but U-boats could get around that by being submerged during the day and running on the surface only at night or during periods of heavy cloud cover. The next big inventions were radar and high-frequency direction finding (Huff-duff). Both could detect U-boats even through darkness or heavy weather, the last one particularly because Donitz exercising close control over his U-boats meant that they'd make radio transmissions rather often. This was huge for being fore-warned of incoming U-boats before the torpedoes started flying. Later, radar would be equipped on airplanes as well, preventing U-boats from using that particular cloak of stealth (when it was available). Normally a plane would need clear skies to spot a U-boat running on the surface, at which point it'd dive on the sub to try and bomb/depth-charge it. Except clear skies also means the U-boat can spot the incoming bomber and would try to crash-dive in response. With the advent of radar, a plane could detect a U-boat and begin its attacking dive from cloud cover, drastically reducing the ability of the sub to evade. Another invention of note was the Leigh Light, a searchlight with 160 000 times the luminousity of a common lightbulb. When hunting for U-boats at night, the patrol plane would make the initial detection with radar, turn in for the attack run, and then turn on the Leigh Light on final approach to completely reveal the U-boat in the world biggest and brightest flashlight. The Germans would try to counter these inventions with a radar warning receiver and U-boats designed to carry heavy flak guns, but their radar receivers lagged behind the latest Allied radars, meaning they didn't warn the U-boats of much of anything, while the flak-boats were just plain ineffective. After radar and huff-duff came the Hedgehog, a great replacement for the depth charge. The problem with the depth charge is that you dump it off the side or the rear of a ship, when your hydrophones/ASDIC dome is at the front of a ship - this made depth charging fairly inaccurate because not only would you lose contact with your prey in the final seconds just before shooting your weapon, the resulting explosion would make it difficult to re-establish contact after the attack. Destroyers working in pairs, with one listening and the other attacking helped somewhat, but the Hedgehog was still a massive improvement. It was essentially a mortar that would propel an explosive projectile AHEAD of the ship, allowing the destroyer to adjust aim all the way to the actual shot, as well as maintaining a good position for re-acquiring the target with ASDIC should it survive. Finally, I cannot overstate the usefulness of the efforts of the Polish and the British in cracking the ENIGMA code. That in itself is a large topic and had implications reaching far beyond just the Battle of the Atlantic, but with regards to fighting off U-boats it gave the Allies critical information with regards to which convoys were in danger of being attacked, and sometimes also the time, direction and number of U-boats involved. From there, the Allies could try to steer the convoys out of danger, reallocate more escorts and other resources to assist, or simply just provide advanced warning to the convoy commander. From there, the weapons and tactics would take over. How did the U-boat threat evolve? At the start of the war, the Allied navies did not practice convoying on a large scale, despite the lessons learned from WWI. A big reason for this was a real lack of escorts - the post-war downsizing of the Royal Navy meant that they had even less assets to work with than in the previous war. This was off-set somewhat by U-boats having to operate from German ports, which limited their range, the winter of 1939 causing some U-boats to be stuck in port, and problems with German torpedo detonators. Nevertheless, the U-boats were out in force, they started sinking ships literally hours after the declaration of war between Britain and Germany (SS Athenia, Sep 3 1939) and the Royal Navy suffered some embarassing defeats in the form of the loss of the HMS Royal Oak and the HMS Courageous. The latter half of 1940 marked what is now known as the First Happy Time - the German Army had just conquered France, giving U-boats free access to the Atlantic without having to traverse the North Sea, radar and Huff-duff had not yet been deployed in large enough numbers to make a dramatic impact and the Royal Navy was still lacking sufficient warships. The RN was resorting to using corvettes as ocean-bound escorts, a task that the small craft were completely unsuited for. The confluence of all these factors allowed the U-boats to reap a terrible harvest of sunk ships without the RN being able to respond effectively. The First Happy Time came to an end by mid/late 1941, when convoys were finally being implemented fully and developments in radar and Huff-duff were seeing widespread deployment. This was when the wolfpack started seeing mainstream use for the first time as well as a response to the improved Allied tactics, with the biggest of the year being Wolfpack West with 23 U-boats that began operating as a unit on May 8 1941. The Second Happy Time came in Jan 1942, just after the entry of the United States into WWII. Admiral Donitz organized as many of his long-rang Type IX U-boats as possible to cross the Atlantic and patrol off the Eastern Seaboard. Some of these subs would only operate on one propeller and would fill their ballast tanks with diesel to maximize their potential range. What the U-boats found upon arriving near the coast of the US was a navy that was wholly unprepared for submarines: Merchant ships were still running with their lights on, those that didn't were silhouetted against the bright lights of New York and other ports that were not order to go into blackout, ships were operating singly, and many navigational aids such as bouys and lighthouses still operated as in peacetime. This was exacerbated by a complete lack of assets; the US Navy didn't have anything larger than a Coast Guard cutter to patrol the coastal areas, and the US Army controlled all air assets (that were untrained for anti-submarine work in any case). What resulted was a harvest of tonnage so rich that some U-boat captains had more good targets than they had torpedoes. The saying "loose lips sink ships" was not so much about keeping secrets confidential to prevent them from leaking to the enemy, but rather to keep ship losses confidential to prevent them from coming back to the home front and damaging morale. Losses were eventually mitigated by the transfer of anti-sub trawlers and corvettes from the RN to the USN in Mar 1942, followed by the Canadian Navy assisting with escort duties, the USN finally implementing convoys in Apr, and the RAF providing anti-sub air patrols in July. In September that year came the Laconia Incident: U-156 torpedoed the RMS Laconia off the coast of West Africa. As was done by U-boats fairly often up to that point, the crew of the U-boat began basic rescue operations; helping survivors board lifeboats, providing food, water, directions to the nearest coast, and so on as was consistent with Prize Rules (but this was not always followed, as in the case of the very first sinking of the war, the SS Athenia). In fact, other nearby U-boats were contacted and were providing assistance as well. What happened next was a B-25 Liberator bomber began attacking the surfaced U-156 while it was flying a Red Cross flag because it was carrying survivors from the Laconia. It had attempted to communicate the same to the Allies, but in any case the specific circumstances would still not have afforded U-156 the same Hague Convention protections granted to hospital ships. This incident is significant in U-boat history because the attack of the Liberator bomber convinced Admiral Donitz to issue the "Laconia Order", that U-boats would under no circumstances offer assistance to victims of their attacks, which was practically a confirmation of Unrestricted Submarine Warfare. During the post-war Nuremberg Trials, prosecutors dug up this Laconia Order to accuse Donitz of a war crime, but he was eventually acquitted, in no small part by USN Admiral Chester Nimitz providing the counter-point that America herself had been practicing Unrestricted Submarine Warfare under a similar order from the very first day of their entry into the war. Between Jul 1942 and May 1943, the tonnage war had entered some kind of parity: The Allies had all the pieces in place to put up a good fight, but didn't have enough ships and planes to cover every convoy. The Germans were feeling the effects of American entry into the war, but continued to score significant victories over the Allies. Of particular note is the stretch of ocean between Halifax, Canada and Iceland, which could only be patrolled by B-24 Liberators modified for Very Long Range duty. While numbers of these aircraft were limited, patrols along the mid-Atlantic were sparse enough to allow wolfpacks repeated success against underescorted convoys. As the number of available escort ships and aircraft began to steadily ramp up, the next innovation was the Hunter-Killer group. These were task forces of destroyers and corvettes centered around an escort carrier (a great example being the USS Guadalcanal). The concept was to have a roving task force of anti-sub assets utilizing constant air cover and patrols, radar, Huff-duff and ULTRA/Enigma intelligence to proactively hunt down U-boats instead of waiting for the U-boats to come to a convoy. The Royal Navy had already toyed with this idea with HMS Courageous early in the war, but the immaturity of naval aviation coupled with the size of the carrier and a then-lack of destroyer escorts just turned the Courageous into a big target when her biplanes were unavailable. By 1943, the Allied navies had destroyers to spare, the escort carriers were much smaller yet could field much more capable aircraft (F4F Wildcats and TBF Avengers) and they had much better methods to detect and attack U-boats. From there on out the U-boats began to constantly lose ground. They were hounded by air patrols as soon as they left port, and the night did not offer respite anymore. In the event that they found a convoy, they would often be so heavily guarded that the newest acoustic and very-long-range torpedoes still did not offer a significant advantage. And that was if the Hunter-Killer Groups didn't find them first, especially since being out in the mid-Atlantic still left them open to carrier-based patrols and ULTRA-sourced intercepts. As 1943 turned into 1944, the technology did not change much - just that there was an overwhelming number of Allied assets out there hunting U-boats 24/7, and production and training by the Kriegsmarine could not match losses. Coupled with the eventual loss of the French ports on the Atlantic following D-Day, and the U-boats were eventually rolled back, and not even the invention of the modern diesel-electric could change it.
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Jan 3, 2014 18:56
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bewbies posted:Another obnoxious what-if: To put this in some perspective, the US built 2 710 Liberty Ships between 1941 and 1945. At 14 474 tons per ship, that's 39.2 million tons of shipping, or approximately 933 000 tons per month for the 42 months of the war that the US was in. Over the course of the entire war, the U-boat fleet only sank 2 779 ships, worth 14.1 million tons and the best tonnage month was only about 700 000 tons in one month of 1942. Now obviously all of those Liberty Ships did not necessarily go to Europe, but keep in mind that's not counting whatever tonnage the US already started with, and that I'm not even counting all of the tonnage previously owned by and later produced by Britain. The five-hour battery recharge time of the Type XXI boats would probably have made them more resilient to ASW efforts, and maybe you can side-step Huff-duff by not radioing Donitz so drat much, but they would probably still need to use the periscope to make attacks, and that would leave them vulnerable. I would expect that it'd be much like what happened to the Me-262s: Very hard to kill individually, but the Allies will just swarm you and target your bases. I reckon the RAF would tell the 8th Air Force to stop dicking around the U-boat pens with 500 lb bombs and hit them with a few Grand Slams instead. In any event, even if they managed to dodge most of the ASW, there's just way too many ships they need to sink to be able to make a real dent in the Allied lake if the hypothetical puts us in 1943. If I were to pose my what-if, it would along the lines of the Kriegsmarine forgetting all about their big-gun projects and instead redirecting the shipyards to producing 100-150 more Type VIIs before the outbreak of war, and also fix the torpedoes pre-Norway so you can trigger the First Happy Time from 1939 onwards.
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Jan 3, 2014 19:33
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Nenonen posted:On the topic of U-boats, how many tons of cargo did the long range submarines transport between Germany and Japan during the war? Did any of it make any strategic difference? The U-boats modified specifically to become transports to Japan could carry about 200-250 tons of cargo. They carried things like dismantled V-1 and V-2 rockets, dismantled Panther tanks, engines, weapons schematics, and occasionally liaison officers between the two nations. It did not really make any difference - the Japanese didn't (couldn't) do anything with the technology that was shared by the Germans. They had blueprints for their own versions of the Me-262 and or the Komet, but those never went into production even if they were derived from stuff shared through the U-boats.
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Jan 3, 2014 20:32
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3 posted:Fleet boats in the Pacific! This was a great post, thanks for making it. Fangz posted:Would the Germans have been more effective if they adopted the naval mine methodology the US deployed against the Japanese? The naval mine method worked in conjunction with everything else that the US was doing. If we created a scenario where Nazi Germany had a bunch of B-29s to drop mines all around England with and U-boats to do the same, you might still see an outcome where the British just sweeps the mines. The mining of the Japanese Home Islands worked so well because the Japanese were depleted of oil, depleted of minesweepers, depleted of all kinds of ships, really, which meant that any mines that were laid down were never going to be removed (except unintentionally, once  )
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Jan 4, 2014 15:34
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Would it have been possible to load the Paris Gun with weed and use that? With 130km of range, you could almost send it right to San Diego from Mexicali.
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Jan 6, 2014 16:19
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Phanatic posted:If we're going for "most absurd," one of the envisaged uses for what became the Saturn rocket was to resupply Army units in the field. I'm pretty sure whoever came up with the of using what is effectively an ICBM to deliver bullets and beans to some troops on the next continent over was high as a loving kite.  Who is Hermann Goring? 
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Jan 6, 2014 19:05
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brozozo posted:Finally, a few questions of my own about WWI: This is from a couple pages back, but I finally got to the relevant part in Guns of August. Part of the problem was logistics: There were no east-west rail lines running from Russian Poland to German Prussia, and Russian and German rail gauges were incompatible anyway (a fact that would also weigh heavily in the next war), which meant that as Russian supplies reached the pre-war border, they could only be sent to the front via horse-drawn transportation. This made it very difficult to establish telephone and telegraph lines running from the front back to Russian high command, on top of the Germans destroying any telegraph/telephone stations and lines they left behind as well as evacuating all rolling stock to prevent Russians from using rail-lines without need for gauge conversion. The net effect was that the Russians could only communicate to their General Staff via radios, and they were forced to broadcast unencrypted messages because their cryptologists could not find transportation to the front either. The second time Russian cryptology was mentioned, it was supposedly in a very simple code that was broken quickly by a cryptologist attached to the German 8th Army staff. There's no explicit mention of what the code was or what cryptology was like for the Russian Army as a whole, but I would not be surprised if the Russian Army lacked formal procedures for it, either due to the general backwardness of their doctrine/technology or just during the battle as a result of the abbreviated mobilization they pulled off in order to meet their obligations with the French.
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Jan 8, 2014 12:55
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Big Willy Style posted:I thought the Mongols established a lot of the 'rules' surrounding abassadors and the like? So yeah, sounds kinda fishy to me. Also, they were pretty cool with other religions as long as you prayed for the Khan. I learned this from Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, but yeah he did mention that the Mongols were pretty tolerant by the standards of the time - if there's a lot of gods out there but you don't know which one answers prayers, why not let people pray to whoever they want?
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Jan 8, 2014 17:31
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The Entire Universe posted:I always thought that it was a case of arms briefly outstripping some quotient of armor and mobility, in the case of WWI. Why operate in the open field or in thinly-armored cars when the enemy has machine guns in a static, fortified position? gently caress it, just dig in and use your artillery to work them over before finishing off with an infantry charge. Yes, it was possible to smash the defenders in trenches by drowning them in artillery shells*. Most generals had (more-or-less) figured that out by 1916. The next problem was making hay out of the advance: Your men are running across muddy, cratered ground that hasn't had all of the barbed wire removed yet, and they're carrying full packs, which means they can only run so far. They can probably make it to the first line of trenches no problem, but at that point you've lost contact with them because telegraph wires don't carry across No Man's Land, radios aren't that portable yet and couriers are too slow even if they did survive going to HQ then back again to the line. If you planned the advance along a narrow front ("bite-and-hold") and maybe pre-synchronized the rate of advance with the artillery, you might even have mustered up enough force to make it to the second trench line, but now your men have created a salient and are open to attack from 3 sides. If this was a broad front offensive, you probably don't have enough concentration of force to make significant gains, or you only make significant gains in some sectors which creates salients anyway. In both cases, you're advancing through bad terrain and away from railheads, while the enemy is retreating into prepared positions and good infrastructure, which means you're never going to advance fast enough to prevent him from throwing up reserves in front of whatever half-breakthrough you might have created. The whole machine-gun/artillery/dug-in-defenders dynamic was a tactical evolution. On the operational side, the Western Front devolved into trench warfare due to logistics. The defender could move with trains while the attacker could only march. Even though generals had figured out how to initiate an attack and make good the first phase, there just wasn't any good answers for the exploitation phase. * As Godholio said, there's technically more to it than just firing off a ton of shells into trenches - long bombardments that announce what you're doing long before you begin the attack are less effective than things like creeping barrages, short-sharp bombardments just enough to make everyone duck for cover while the infantry advances (and then you bombard them again once people stick out their heads), or mixed-shell and mixed-intensity barrages along a wide front that don't tell the enemy when and where you're going to attack.
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Jan 10, 2014 16:51
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Slavvy posted:So if attack was basically futile and defence was far more efficient in a men and materiel, and everyone in command pretty much knew this already, what was the point of making any kind of attack at all? Why not just constantly defend and let the other side wear themselves out? Was it really just because they thought Germany was right on the edge of collapsing and throwing more men at them would hasten that? Your last question did play a part - Allied intelligence services kept saying that the Germans lost way more men than the Allies did whenever the Allies attacked (partly out of national pride, partly because the intel was plain bad) and the generals bought into it enough to think that Germany was always just on the other side of running out of manpower after this next offensive. Keep in mind though that we're talking about the Western Front. The Eastern Front remained relatively fluid and mobile and it's a what-if of the war for the Central Powers to have remained on the defensive in the West, throw most of their weight into going after Russia and hoping to trigger a national collapse earlier. The unfeasible part of this what-if is with regards to political considerations on going purely defensive in the West. Shimrra Jamaane posted:But then they lost nearly as many troops as the French. So what happened? AFAIK, the Germans lost sight of what they wanted to do. They pissed away so many men trying to take Verdun as a symbolic/political gesture that they were no longer following the original objective of luring the French into killing zones and destroying them afterwards. The French also managed to adapt better to the demands of the battle, particularly in the way Petain rotated pretty much the entire French Army through Verdun as a means of letting everyone gain experience while preventing front-line divisions from getting ground down to nubs.
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Jan 11, 2014 05:25
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Frostwerks posted:Anything interesting happen on Formosa in the second? I'm pretty sure it was a Japanese colony/protectorate since around the turn of the century, I was just wondering if there were any interesting battles on the island proper or if its importance was to the IJN or for tropical goods... maybe rubber and rice production? The USN launched a large-scale carrier raid against Formosa in October 10-20 1944 to suck up the IJN's airpower reserves prior to the invasion of the Philippines at Leyte Gulf. The results were as or even more lopsided as in the Marianas Turkey Shoot: a 6:1 kill ratio in favor of the USN with ~600 Japanese planes shot down and dozens of small warships sunk or destroyed in harbor. The Japanese claimed to have sunk something on the order of 40 carriers and 12 battleships. In my opinion, the raid was also notable for its after-effects on the lead-up to the Battle of Leyte Gulf. It worked as far as depleting IJN airpower so badly that there was practically no aircraft and no pilots that could fly from the IJN carrier bait force (that would later be sunk at the Battle of Cape Engano), but the fact that Admiral Halsey and his staff didn't catch the IJN carriers at Formosa and that they didn't know that the IJN was flat-broke on planes meant that they were still on the verge of obsessed with finding and sinking them. As well, the ~100 USN planes lost during the raid coupled with the exertion of flying more than 2 000 sorties inside a week fatigued enough pilots that Halsey was operating with only 6 out of 12 carriers - the rest had to sit out the Leyte Gulf operation to rest and refit. While a doctrinaire response to spotting the IJN carriers would probably still have involved sending all of the fleet carriers against them anyway (concentration of force and all that), it perhaps stands to reason that Halsey might have left some CVLs to guard the San Bernardino Strait if he had some extra assets to play with. In the event, San Bernardino was only guarded by Taffy 3 and Halsey's squeamishness about not having enough fighters to provide air cover if he split up his forces didn't really matter because Ozawa's carrier force barely had any striking power anyway. Source: Sea of Thunder by Evan Thomas
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Jan 13, 2014 08:33
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Here's a question: What is (was?) STAVKA? What does it mean, what does it stand for? I ask because Guns of August was still referring to the Russian high command as STAVKA which kind of stood out because I had always associated it with the Red Army.
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Jan 14, 2014 15:13
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WW1 book recommendations: I thought A World Undone was a great breakdown of the war in general. He covers the political machinations leading up to the war (spoiler alert: the Austro-Hungarians are scheming assholes), delves into the background of each country and goes into the right amount of detail when it comes to pivotal battles such as the Marne, the Somme, Verdun, Tannenberg, Gorlice-Tarnow and the Brusilov Offensive. On that note, can I get a recommendation for a good book about the Russian Civil War? I feel like that'd be a good follow-up to my WW1 kick. Shimrra Jamaane posted:I think the Germans bought into the whole Cult of the Offensive thing just as much as the French did so it would have been unthinkable for them to just wait and react. Not that I'm disagreeing with your post in general, but the French Cult of the Offensive was doctrine that permeated every level of their army, from the strategic down to the operational through to the tactical level. The Germans had to launch an offensive against France (and therefore Belgium) because of strategic and political considerations, but "Cult of the Offensive"-type thinking didn't extend down to their choice of artillery, the color of their pantaloons and their use of machine guns and rifle fire vs bayonet charges.
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Jan 20, 2014 06:09
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Raskolnikov38 posted:I dunno, their original plan was to hold in the east while quickly striking west. The east just turned into offensive because Prittwitz panicked, wanted to retreat to the Vistula (which Moltke had previously authorized him to do, if he was actually facing a overwhelming force), and got shitcanned. Hoffman and Ludendorff*, not being the 'fat idiot' they replaced, then pull off a devastating victory allowing the Central powers to advance. Hoffman was just bitter that Hindenburg/Ludendorff got all the glory for the plan that was originally his.
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Jan 20, 2014 07:14
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The Entire Universe posted:I thought a good portion of The Guns of August dealt with Britain's hemming and hawing over actually committing more than a minuscule force. I got the impression as well that Britain wasn't going to join in on the war if Germany did not violate Belgian neutrality. They might have mustered up the gumption in the event of impending German victory and dominion, but eh, that's getting into alt-history. I also got the impression that France had plans (if not necessarily outright intent) to cross into Belgium and engage German forces prior to their crossing of the Franco-Belgian border, but definitely they weren't thinking about violating Belgian neutrality first, because they knew that'd make the Brits turn on them all too quickly. If anything, Germany was sending lies to the British that the French had crossed over first and the Kaiser was moving to defend Belgium from French perfidy as an attempt to sway the British to their side or at least keep them neutral
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Jan 20, 2014 18:39
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German atrocities versus Belgian civilians did not start until days after occupation*, so the British decision to declare war on Germany was (at least on paper) based solely on the actual violation of Belgian neutrality. Popular opinion did turn on the Germans once they had started shooting priests and suspected franc-tireurs (coolest French term I learned from that book), but none of that had quite happened when government took a vote on intervention. * Guns of August taught me that these were deliberate acts designed to silence the population through some sort of doctrine of terror. What the hell, man 
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Jan 20, 2014 19:32
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Raskolnikov38 posted:Well there's "Ten Days that Shook the World" by John Reed for a first hand account but it is definitely biased. "A People's Tragedy" by Figes is good and relatively unbiased (he dislikes everyone) but there was some scandal involving him and amazon reviews IIRC. Hey, thanks! Ten Days That Shook the World's Kindle edition was free!
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Jan 21, 2014 07:22
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Raskolnikov38 posted:The key component of Joffre's head-rear end-ectomy of course being when he decided to actually listen to Gallieni. Besides Gallieni and Lanrezac picking up after Joffre, I'd also like to throw in Moltke being an indecisive flip-flopper. That right flank, man ...
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Jan 22, 2014 07:25
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Comstar posted:What was he doing beforehand, and what did he do afterwards? France was pretty much married to the idea of attacking/counter-attacking as soon as war broke out between them and Germany. In particular, they had planned to attack directly across the Franco-German border into Alsace-Lorraine. This was a doctrinal move (Cult of the Offensive) as much as a political one, Alsace-Lorraine being an object of French revanchism since 1870. Joffre and the rest of the French high command, GQG, were so dead-set on following through with this plan that kept ignoring all of the signs of the Schlieffen Plan's right-hook, even after the Belgian King had sent word that such a move was developing right across his country. This was exacerbated by Joffre's personality being a very laconic one, and his attitude towards his subordinate generals being that once orders had been issued, it was up to a general to execute them, but certainly not to question the reasoning behind it. As it happened, Lanrezac, who was commander of the French 5th Army on the left-most position of the French line (facing the German right-wing hook), kept bombarding Joffre with pleas to let him reposition his troops to better face the oncoming envelopment. Joffre refused until just about the last minute because he still wanted to launch his offensive into Alsace-Lorraine and the Ardennes Forest, both of which turned out to be failures anyway. Joffre's response to the right-hook was very late, almost disastrously so, but after he did pull his head out of his rear end he put his stoic, unwavering persona to good use during the withdrawal to the river Marne and the succeeding defense of the area just north of Paris. Whether Joffre stood fast out of sound and genuine military logic or out of a sheer lack of imagination is still debated to this day.
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Jan 22, 2014 13:15
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I'm no expert, but: #3 is to an extent only true for British and French forces. One of the oft-mentioned mistakes with how the Germans executed Verdun was keeping the committed divisions on the line for weeks/months on end until they were ground down to nubs, as opposed to Petain cycling French divisions in and out of the sector until most of the French army had gone through it. #5 I generally agree with - Sir Douglas Haig got unfairly bagged on as an incompetent commander because reasons, and some of the better late-war commanders were working-class men, Canadians and Australians especially. #7 doesn't really mean anything. Yes, tactics got better and people eventually stopped trying to do bayonet charges from 200 meters out, but the next question is "if tactics did get better over time, why was there still no large-scale movement on the Western Front (aside from Operation Michael and the final German collapse?" and as was tackled prior, it's because the superiority of defense over offense during the war was more a logistical/operational facet and less a tactical one.
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Jan 23, 2014 06:35
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The Entire Universe posted:I had the hilarious thought of Kitchener showing up in full uniform regalia, leaning in and pointing at French's face like the propaganda posters, and saying "I WANT YOU TO STOP BEING SUCH A FUCKUP." The only account we have of that closed-door meeting between French and Kitchener was French's, and his was a cover-your-rear end recollection, so as far as we know your scenario is entirely plausible 
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Jan 23, 2014 18:09
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a travelling HEGEL posted:I last read that book as a literal child so I don't remember what the issue here is. I think it's the implication that the power-suited "Mobile Infantry" could ever be a model for future armies. Unless you plan on drop-shipping a force at every single point to apprehend the entire enemy force in one go, every engagement would just turn into Operation Market-Garden. That's my interpretation anyway.
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Jan 24, 2014 12:18
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gfanikf posted:Only downside is no footnotes, but Amazon seems to be pairing more and more up with buy a kindle book get cheap audio and vice versa, They do this? I have a bunch of mil-hist audiobooks that I'd love to get a Kindle version for cheap if only so I can do quick looks for references. Also because I have no idea how to spell the names of the French generals I keep hearing about. There was some guy named "Monjan" the Butcher in Verdun? Whatever! On a slightly off-topic note, I bought the beat-the-average audiobook Humble Bundle purely because I recognized George Guidall as the narrator from the "An Army at Dawn" audiobook. He has a wizened old man quality to his voice that made it sound like I was listening to grandpa talking about his exploits in the North African campaign (lots of gently caress-ups there)
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Jan 25, 2014 07:21
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Not as much stupid as overly cautious, but the lack of balls on Admiral Troubridge when pursuing the Goeben had repercussions rippling across Europe for decades. He's the naval equivalent of that chemist that invented both leaded gasoline AND CFCs.
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Jan 25, 2014 17:10
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uPen posted:What is the purpose of this thing? A plane that can only fly on water or a ship that goes fast but can't take a hit? AFAIK that's an "ekranoplan", or ground-effect plane. It appeared once as a plot point in a James Bond where the Soviets were using it to smuggle illicit goods from Iran across the Caspian Sea
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Jan 26, 2014 09:09
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Did the Soviets or any of their allies/client states ever get to use their heavy bombers in a combat situation? Anything from their copy of the B-29 to their Backfire bombers. For that matter, what did they use the TB-3 and Pe-8's for in WW2? I know that they never really pursued a strategic bombing campaign against Germany, but they apparently produced 818 of the former and 93 of the latter.
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Jan 27, 2014 19:39
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Wow, thanks guys, that was a really fast response! How about this: could a Phalanx CIWS have destroyed the Japanese strikes against the USS Yorktown in June 1942? No, that's a joke, you don't have to answer that  Koesj posted:Calling the Backfire a heavy bomber puts you squarely in the 1970s team B camp of wanting to have them count towards strategic weapons in SALT negotiations. Oh shucks, yeah, that was just me not really thinking about my phrasing and playing fast and loose with the term 'heavy bomber'. I guess they do have more in common with the Aardvark, don't they? (BTW your Cold War effort-posts rock, including the one you made in the D&D modern symmetrical war thread) The Entire Universe posted:I'm just wondering when doctrine transitioned from being all about poo poo like charging guns on horses and started being "this is what I want you to do by this time" - I'm guessing that was during the interwar years of the 20th century but if there's writing on this being a thing during the trench warfare of WWI I'd love to get my hands on that. I'm interested in that evolution. Specifically with regards to "dudes on horses", there were already commanders as early as in the American Civil War that realized/acknowledged that it was better to use cavalry simply as "infantry that could mount horses to ride quickly to a spot, but they will fight dismounted". There were individual French commanders in WWI that realized this, but at the same time the German Uhlans still did some of their fighting on horseback and with lances. It really depended, and AFAIK the shift didn't really become doctrinal until horses were replaced by trucks and half-tracks and tanks altogether. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Jan 27, 2014 |
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Jan 27, 2014 20:20
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The Entire Universe posted:Embarrassed to say the first place I heard this line was in Civ 5. Same! The Civ series teaches you a bunch of cool historical trivia. Anyway, someone will undoubtedly be able to answer this better, but I'm fairly sure that the lack of trucks was due to the limits of German industry: They had to rebuild an army, an air force and a navy from scratch, and something had to give. The concept of motorized / mechanized divisions has ties to not being able to produce enough trucks for all your infantry, so you designate specific ones that can and the rest will march. The sanctions from the Treaty of Versailles played an indirect role in that, but also the inefficiencies of the Nazi economics/industry. Contrast this to the USA, whose army was eventually almost completely motorized while also providing thousands and thousands of trucks to the Soviet Union.
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Jan 29, 2014 15:31
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