Ask Us About Military History: Remove Balls To Fire Blanks

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Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Pyle posted:

Last thread had a long chat about different naval guns and artillery development in general. It left me thinking about the effectiveness of certain types of artillery. For example, I learned that the 16 inch (406mm) naval cannon delivers only about 150 pounds of TNT in one round. What is the impact of such round when it hits the target? Penetration? Kill radius of the shrapnel? Are there any charts on the effectiveness of artillery cannons?

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.

e: if you really love technical charts this has data for shell penetration and so does this.

Flappy Bert fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Nov 14, 2013

# ¿ Nov 14, 2013 15:59

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# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 21:14

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

gradenko_2000 posted:

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.

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.

British fuse design was weak: they tended to trigger on contact instead of after penetration, and obviously that doesn't do you any good. The typical story says that the British had no idea this was a problem until the former Swedish naval attach� to Berlin told Beatty about the Germans's internal bragging vis a vis British shells.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2013 18:11

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

gradenko_2000 posted:

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.

I think you might be a little mixed up: the British realized that they had an issue with powder handling after Jutland, which was also where Lion took that near-fatal hit. The other two battlecruisers seemed to be notice enough.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2013 20:12

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Unluckyimmortal posted:

Well, they lost a few other ships in a (possibly, we'll never know because they blew up) very similar way during the battle itself.

My point with regard to the Lion in particular is that the battlecruiser squadrons as well as 5th Battle Squadron were on an almost literal course for annihilation. I've never been terribly impressed by Beatty versus Jellicoe as a wartime admiral, but Beatty was just a few minutes away from ordering a course change when his flagship failed to explode. If it hadn't failed to explode, a sizeable portion of the Royal Navy was on course to be gobbled up by the entire German fleet, which was the strategic objective every German admiral hoped to accomplish and the thing that kept Jellicoe up at night in cold sweats. Basically, and I really don't think this is overplaying it, true disaster at Jutland could have effectively ended the war in favor of the German Empire virtually overnight.

Yeah, completely. My point was that Surigao strait was so far from a "fair fight" that it's basically impossible to determine who did what to whom because you had two aging Japanese battleships getting plastered by 6 USN battleships, 6 USN heavy cruisers, and a whole shitpile of PT boats and destroyers.

In the end, though, my point is that battleships just aren't terribly good at killing each other, if we look at the historical record since the start of WWI, in an unusual parity of armor and firepower.

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.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2013 20:24

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

gradenko_2000 posted:

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.

Everything else you and unluckyimmortal have said is well taken, but that I have to nitpick on: Room 40 can still read all the German fleet's radio communications, so while the High Seas Fleet can decide whether to sally or not the decision to give battle is going to rest with Britain.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2013 21:15

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

the JJ posted:

They didn't know the American carriers were there. That was sort of the point of Midway.

No, the point totally was that they were going to lure the US fleet out of Pearl and force ~~Decisive Battle~~, they just expected to have captured Midway by then. The US move was supposed to be in reaction to the invasion, not a preemption.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2013 20:01

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Cumshot in the Dark posted:

David Fromkin asserts in A Peace to End All Peace that the primary reason for the Ottoman alliance with Germany during WW1 was due to the fact that Enver and Talaat made a secret offer to hand over the Sultan Osman in the event of war, since the Ottomans (according to Fromkin) could not really offer anything else of value to Germany to justify an alliance. (Of course, Churchill seized the Osman anyways.) Is this a view that is accepted by most other historians? I'm just curious about the political calculus of it all.

That's pretty uncommon and a bizarre view too. How do the Ottomans have nothing to offer Germany besides a dreadnought? Not only does it open up the second Caucasus front it cuts off the Black Sea and locks Russia away from the allies for half the year due to ice, and it threatens the Suez canal.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2013 00:06

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

count_von_count posted:

A few pages ago, but this is my favorite u-boat sinking as well. Also, the "someone on board" who flushed improperly was the boat's commander KL Karl-Adolf Schlitt.

To continue subchat, does anyone have any idea why the IJN was obsessed with constructing subs that could carry a seaplane? IIRC the I-400 class boats were Yamamoto's brainchild, but they never made any strategic or tactical sense to me.

The original purpose of the -400 class was attacking west coast targets in the US, which the Japanese were understandably obsessed with. They then got it into their heads that they should bomb the locks of the Panama Canal but by the time that plan was together it was deemed irrelevant and they were retasked.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2013 03:00

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Bacarruda posted:

Aside from the initial spotting of the Kido Butai by a Midway-based PBY, how important was midway-based aircraft to the outcome of the battle?

The B-17s scored zero hits. The B-26s scored zero hits. The Buffaloes got shot down in droves defending the island. The TBFs of VT-6 scored zero hits and had only one surviving aircraft. From my understanding, it was the carrier-based aviation that brought home the bacon.

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.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2013 03:57

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Azran posted:

Bewbies, I loved your effort posts about planes. I'd love to hear about all the stuff like self-sealing tanks, ammo counters, sights and the like; how did all those develop through the years? When did fixed landing gear disappear? Did WW1 fighter pilots even get parachutes/straps?

What about drugs? I read that the Germans gave their fighter pilots amphetamines so they could fly more missions. Did any other nation do that too? What about the soldiers on the ground? A friend of mine is studying Medicine and some professors have told him the Americans gave drugs to their foot soldiers to improve their performance.

Every combatant nation handed out drugs of various kinds like candy to just about anyone, pilots especially but not exclusively. The US and UK issued a chemical variant of amphetamine under the name Benzedrine, while the Germans and Japanese just gave good old methamphetamine. A quick look doesn't reveal much data on usage, but I see a paper quoting a USAAF survey that gave 15% of fighter pilots using Benzedrine both 'regularly' and more or less whenever they felt like they needed it. The same paper observes a military hospital shortly after the war dealing with a serious amphetamine addiction among its inmates, where a third of the users picked it up during the war.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2013 07:13

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Flesnolk posted:

Would it be at all possible for a clash between major powers to not immediately result in nuclear armageddon?

Also, to stay on topic, a really popular alternate history idea is "what if Britain won the AWI". A lot of people portray it like everything would've been sunshine and roses from then on, but how feasible was the win? I know the French basically did all the real work, so I imagine if they don't enter the rebel colonists get curbstomped? How would a British victory in the colonies have affected the empire's later fortunes? They seemed to do just fine (I like to joke better) without the American colonies.

Well, American and Russian pilots fought directly during Korea, the entire Cuban Missile Crisis, etc. it definitely seems possible in a limited sense as long as both sides haven't fully committed.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2013 17:02

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Slightly tangential to military history, but why is it that all the diplomatic accounts of WWI have an ambassador requesting for his passport? Is it standard practice for an ambassador to have his passport impounded by the host nation until he gets expelled or recalled?

# ¿ Dec 4, 2013 20:23

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Slavvy posted:

On a broader WW2 note, why did the germans just...not give up? It seems that when the advantage is so overwhelming and you're being pressed from both sides, why not just surrender unconditionally to the western allies so the soviets don't end up with half your country? Why bother fighting right to the very end?

As it happens, this wasn't an idea that went totally unnoticed: Himmler tried to open negotiations with the Allies on his own initiative with the intent of forming a united front against the USSR. Hitler found out about it and promptly ordered him executed, and we probably don't need to talk about why Hitler didn't feel like surrendering to the Allies. Unsurprisingly, the Allies were uninterested in a full-scale war with the USSR and declined to go into detail with Himmler anyways.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2013 22:19

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

That looks like exactly what we need for a hostage rescue scenario, a fleet of metal boxes with Sopwith Camels stapled onto it roaring into Afghanistan :psyduck:

# ¿ Dec 11, 2013 16:27

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Arquinsiel posted:

Isn't it still going on or have the USA finally removed all troops?

'Occupation' isn't still going on but Yokosuka is I'm pretty sure the largest American naval base overseas with a carrier permanently deployed and there's something like 20 thousand marines on Okinawa as well as a huge air force base.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2013 17:13

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Slavvy posted:

I'm interested in this as well. Was there a submarine presence at Jutland? How was it even possible to have a functional diesel submarine when even land vehicles were hilariously unreliable and lovely (during WW1 I mean)? And were there any countermeasures put into place to fight subs?

As it happens, part of the plan for Jutland was that before the Grand Fleet got to the Germans, they would have traveled over a pre-placed submarine line and were supposed to get some dreadnoughts sunk, evening the odds before the real battle. Unluckily, the German fleet was forced by weather to leave port later than was planned and the submarines were within a day of being forced to return to Germany to resupply, and managed to hit precisely 0 British ships.

# ¿ Dec 31, 2013 23:40

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

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?

On the German side, the Imperial leadership knew that because of the blockade and the size of the Russian army they were at a disadvantage when it came to a battle of attrition, so they were of the mind to look for a way to break through and force a settlement.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2014 00:33

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Admittedly, this isn't precisely what you asked for, but the traditional entry point to the First World War is The Guns of August, which is a great summation of the immediate causes of the war and the first few weeks up until the Marne. Very readable.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2014 23:55

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Probably fair to say that without the blockade Germany would have won although I think he might overstate how short it would have been.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2014 01:24

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

It screws up your deck management even further - if you have to arm on the flight deck you can't bring down CAP or recover returning strikes during that time, and if you're expecting to need to do that you just don't arm.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2014 00:35

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

The First World War was traumatic enough to scar the art and literature of Europe right up until a worse war came along and pretty much made pacifism a mainstream political movement, so I'm feeling that there's a bit of nostalgia for the GOOD OLD DAYS OF EMPIRE :britain:

here.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2014 06:16

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Lack of balls is completely unfair; the admiralty even went through a full court-martial and came to the conclusion that it was unreasonable for him to engage a battlecruiser with the forces he had, especially given that he'd been explicitly ordered to not attack a superior force.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2014 17:20

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

I feel like you're looking for the Prussian innovations with a general staff and in delegating power to NCOs?

# ¿ Jan 27, 2014 21:28

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Nah - if you look at what the US did it certainly shows that the limitations weren't technical. But factories building trucks are factories that can be building tanks and planes.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2014 15:24

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Aircraft talk got me looking in the old thread to drag out bewbies's cool old post on WWII air combat.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2014 17:24

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

Did the Western Allies even dive bomb at all? If so what plane did they use the p-47?

The Allies were never big fans of dive-bombing, except for the USN which wanted them for obvious reasons. The Army bought a few thousand SBDs and designated them the A-24, but they didn't get a ton of service and the USAAF pretty quickly switched over to fighter-bombers.

e: I think the institutional reasons for this were that the US before the war didn't see much of a need for tactical airpower because there was nobody nearby to fight on land. Most of the effort went into big bombers like the B-24 and 17 for coastal defense.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2014 01:42

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Both fleets at Jutland hit 2-3% excluding battlecruisers.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2014 16:57

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Fangz posted:

Who would nukes in the South Atlantic be useful as a deterrence against? What the hell does the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation even care about South America?

France has territory in South America. It's not covered under Article V, but it still is tangentially an interest.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2014 02:46

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

BurningStone posted:

Japanese soldiers starved because the US domination of the Pacific cut them off from resupply. Likewise, Japan never re-invaded places because they couldn't get their troops there. If you flip the result of Midway, instead it's Japan dominating the oceans until some time in 1944, while the US builds enough carriers to match them. Guadalcanal and those other landings never happen and instead it's Japan invading places that have been cut off.

Long term, it's hard to see how Japan could have won the war, since they had no way to capture the US mainland. And long term wars tend to go to the side with the larger GNP. But it was hardly predetermined and by no means easy.

Fake edit: The question of which code machine was easier to break is actually very interesting. Anybody here know enough to go into it?

Parity actually comes in the second half of 1943, with a year later the US gaining a 2:1 advantage.

# ¿ Apr 6, 2014 15:45

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Raskolnikov38 posted:

Gallipoli was his idea in WW1 and he would have flights of fancy constantly during WW2. I recall a few weeks before D-Day he tried to argue that the whole invasion should be changed to the Balkans to deny Stalin Eastern Europe.

There's also the two times during WWI where he screwed up naval operations rather significantly by giving contradictory/unclear orders (Graf Spee, Goeben).

# ¿ Apr 7, 2014 19:27

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Is there any good intro book on WWII air combat? Like, general tactics, traits of plains, and then touching on each of the major air campaigns?

# ¿ Apr 19, 2014 05:51

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

ArchangeI posted:

It's not touching on every major air campaign, but Beregrud's Fire in the Sky is very in-depth for the air campaign against Japan in the South Pacific.

Yeah, that's actually why I asked the question: picked up that book and really enjoyed it and was wondering if there was a similar treatment for other theaters.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2014 14:39

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Is Keegan more one of those scholars who had one big hit (Face of Battle) and then coasted along for the rest of the career on it, writing slightly crazy things?

# ¿ Apr 23, 2014 01:48

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

HEY GAL posted:

This is 1582, so it could be either. With iron, you can just cast them instead of paying a cannonball-carver, and those guys make bank. A stone ball is lighter than an iron ball of the same size, though, so it takes less powder. He may find the barrel sexy. I have no idea what the various parts of the carriage do or why there's chains on it, probably something to do with hitching.

Edit: Or with transport; you'd sometimes winch the things off the carriages by the dolphins (the loops above the trunions) and put them in wagons, it could help with that.

How long does it take someone to carve a cannonball? It seems a bit impractical for something you're going to be firing off a lot.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2014 12:54

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

KildarX posted:

Has a proxy war ever gone hot between sponsoring countries? Say in Vietnam. If the US just said gently caress it and attacked the Chinese directly.

China went into Korea.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2014 17:00

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

So The Atlantic had a nice photo feature on historical reenactors recently.

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2014/07/reenacting-the-past/100770/

It's just about everything you know to expect.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2014 05:30

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

cheerfullydrab posted:

For WW2, what would have stopped giant super death fortress tanks that advanced with a bunch of infantry keeping other infantry off their back? I'm talking tanks 3 or 4 times the size of "regular" WW2 tanks. I'm thinking it would just be artillery fire.

Mechanical failure.

# ¿ Dec 2, 2014 06:12

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Grand Prize Winner posted:

Related: how many authors did the strategic bombing campaigns produce? At a hazy guess, I remember Roald Dahl, Kurt Vonnegut, and Walter Miller (he wrote A Canticle for Leibowitz, a fairly well-respected sci-fi novel from the sixties). There's bound to be more, but they're slipping my mind.

Joseph Heller (Catch-22).

# ¿ Feb 23, 2015 22:34

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

Do you guys sometimes get the idea that your history student grandkids will be totally hosed because all the documents you work with are now Excel files that'll be long gone?

# ¿ Dec 4, 2015 22:50

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# ¿ Apr 30, 2024 21:14

Flappy Bert: Dec 11, 2011; I have seen the light, and it is a string

PittTheElder posted:

Wasn't there at least one guy who got acquitted on the grounds of 'we should probably be lenient here, given that we [the Western Allies] have been doing the exact same thing?'

I forget whether that was in regards to submarine warfare or strategic bombing though.

That was Donitz as it happens, who got off in part because Nimitz pointed out that yes, we were doing the exact same thing in the pacific.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2015 19:03

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